Posts Tagged ‘single sourcing’
Advantages of Content Management System (CMS) in Technical Writing
I believe not too far into the future a great majority of technical documents will be produced through Content Management System (CMS) platforms. Reduced to its simplest terms, a CMS is a text editor ran by a relational and searchable database. Content Management Systems are not cheap and they have a learning curve. That’s why…
Read MoreTECHNICAL BOOK REVIEW: "Practical DITA" – A Nuts-and-Bolts Guide to Structured Technical Writing
Julio Vazquez has written a great book: Practical DITA. It’s a tightly-written thin volume (only 100 pages including the Index) that has a lot of nuts-and-bolts type of practical how-to information on DITA — Darwin Information Typing Architecture. The distinguishing characteristic of this short but comprehensive volume is the way it takes you by the…
Read MoreA Source of Potential Component Conflict when Multiple Authors Work in Structured Authoring Environment
Multiple authors writing “components” instead of “pages” is the future of technical communications (if not technical training and e-learning). When it comes to documentation, it really makes sense to “write once and publish multiple times”, as the saying goes. And that’s only possible if we all get used to writing “components” (sometimes also referred to…
Read MoreThings to Avoid in Modular Component Writing for Structured Authoring and Single-Sourcing
In true “structured authoring” the “components” you create (write, draw, etc.) are saved in the database of a Content Management System (CMS). The negative side of this type of “writing” is that you lose the local context and formatting. What you’re creating is not “only” an X-type of document but a “component” (let’s say, a…
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