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Single Sourcing |
Single sourcing is a very simple idea: use one single document as the source for multiple kinds of product-support documents, such as manuals and online help. It is also often misunderstood. Sometimes people think it means the online help and manuals must have identical content, an obviously bad idea; it doesn’t. Others think it requires specialized single-sourcing tools; no, it is more a method of planning and design that can be used with a multitude of tools. And it can be employed helpfully even if the final documents produced need to look entirely different. FrameMaker is especially well-suited to single sourcing. It has two features in particular that make it a very natural process to use: conditional text, and importation of formats. Conditional text lets you create alternate versions of the content of the document depending on your use. The import formats facility lets you create alternate versions of the presentation (including the selection of a particular combination of text conditions). Together with FrameMaker’s clean design for cross-referencing and indexing, these features let you single-source very easily. The problems arise on the output end. Suppose you need to make WinHelp. First you need to convert the Frame document to RTF. Right off, you’ll discover that the native RTF export filter is badly broken; your file may not convert at all, and certainly won’t be ready for WinHelp if it does. You’ll have to spend a lot of time in Word, maybe using a HAT (Help Authoring Tool) to assist you in adding the special footnotes the help compiler requires. When you make any change in the source FrameMaker document, you’ll have to do that work all over again. This is not really single sourcing, in our opinion. We’ve designed Mif2Go from the gate to enable FrameMaker single sourcing without this kind of pain. You make all your settings just once, in the FrameMaker file and in our .ini file. When you run the filter, you get RTF (or HTML or XML, for other Help formats) that is totally ready for the help compiler; you do nothing to it by hand. Absolutely nothing. When you make a change in FrameMaker, you need only a mouseclick or two to produce nice, clean, finished output. | ||||
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