Write Less Publish More Handout

Write Less, Publish More A presentation by:

Kendra Carter Manager, Implementation and Consulting

[email protected]

Adrian Winks Solution Success Manager

[email protected]

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Contents Write Less, Publish More……………..………….……………………………………….……………3

Adaptive Solutions Based On Your Audience’s Needs…..………………………….……4

Highly Configurable, Infinite Possibilities……………………………………………………….9

Designing Your Deliverable Strategy……………………………………………………………10

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………..13

© Copyright 2014 Author-it Software Corporation.

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Write Less, Publish More A common requirement within the Author-it Community is the ability to create similar yet customized documentation for different audiences. For example,

Instructional designers produce an Instructor’s Guide and a Student Guide for each course. The Instructor’s Guide has instructor notes, delivery instructions, and exercise answers, whereas the Student Guide does not.

Service documentation for internal field engineers has part information, assembly diagrams, and assembly instructions. Sales gives potential clients an alternate version where the assembly details are removed to avoid proprietary information leaking to competitors.

Paper size, character, and paragraph formatting differ by local audience.

How can you create similar documentation without duplicating content or maintaining multiple books? You need a solution that promotes reuse, decreases maintenance, and as a very good friend of mine puts it, “has the system work for you, not you working for the system.”


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Adaptive Solutions Based on Your Audience Needs Apply the power of publishing profiles to your content to automatically transform it into different types of deliverables. These highly configurable and flexible objects allow you to define publishing rules that adapt your content to your specific audience needs.

Figure 1: Publishing profiles transforms books into customized deliverables

Outputs Deliverables

• MS Word • PDF • WinHelp • HTML Help • HTML • XHTML • JavaHelp • Oracle Help for Java • XML • DITA

User Manual

Reference Guide

Web Help

FAQ

Policy and Procedure

Online Help

Slideshow

Installation Guide

Newsletter

Field Level Help

Handheld Help


P a g e | 5 By putting a robust deliverable strategy in place, you can maintain the documentation for all audiences in a single book. Why manage all audiences in one book?

• Helps prevent authoring similar content in related deliverables • Increases reuse by having more visibility into content • Reduces time maintaining the content across multiple books • Improves consistency and standardization • Decreases review time by removing redundancy

Let’s explore three common tactics to transform a single book into multiple, highly customized deliverables by audience.

Replace the publishing template

Let’s say you are an OEM partner, or the look of your client-facing material is different from your internal documentation. You simply create a new publishing profile and map to another branded template. As long as your style usage is consistent, you can publish the same content to different looks automatically.

Figure 2: Replace the publishing template with another one


P a g e | 6 Replace one object for another like object

A Replace rule can replace the Instructor Guide title page with the Student Guide title page, or replace portrait-orientation media objects with landscape media objects. One very handy trick is to replace a publishing style with a non-publishing style.

Figure 3: Non-publishing character style Figure 4: Non-publishing paragraph style

A non-publishing style is one that has no output checkboxes enabled on the General tab. This type of rule removes content based on certain styles from the published document.


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Figure 5: Replace one object for another life object

Filter Out Objects Based On Certain Criteria

While Replace rules swap out like objects, Filter rules remove objects entirely. Filter rules look for objects that meet predefined conditions, such as having a certain release state assigned or having a certain variable assignment. When the condition is met, the object or parent-child object group is not published.


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Figure 6: Filter out content based on criteria

You can define a list of Filter rules.


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Highly Configurable, Infinite Possibilities What makes publishing profiles so powerful is their flexibility. You can combine some or all of these tactics in infinite possibilities to create a solution that adapts to your audience’s specific needs. The key is to create a publishing profile for each deliverable and combine the various rules to completely automate the publishing of multiple deliverables by audience from a single book.

The rules take into consideration content at various levels: content can be manipulated at the publishing template level; the object level; and down to the paragraph or character style level. And rules can be combined in a flexible array of options. For example,

Localize a US English document design to Hebrew by combining rules in a “Hebrew PDF” publishing profile that replaces a “US Letter” publishing template with a “Right-to-Left” configured template and replaces all US Letter media objects with A4 media objects.

Combine rules in a “Student Guide” publishing profile that replace Instructor Guide-specific styles with the Do Not Publish style and filters out objects assigned the GuideType variable value of Instructor Guide.

Note: Combine rules in an “Instructors Guide” publishing profile in the same manner, but vice versa.

Combine rules in a client-facing “Product Sheet” publishing profile that replaces the internal publishing template with the highly branded sales version and filters out objects assigned the InternalOnly variable value of Yes.


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Designing Your Deliverable Strategy Defining a robust deliverable strategy to meet the unique needs of your audiences requires upfront analysis, a little experimentation, and testing. Our recommended approach includes, at minimum, the following steps.

Analyze your content and audience

Get to know your audience and what content will meet their needs. Then, answer these questions.

• What is the common “core” content across each deliverable?

• What content is unique to each deliverable type?

• Is the content unique at the object, paragraph, or character level? A combination of all three?

Standardize your formatting and order

To help manage all of your deliverables in a single book, follow these best practices:

• Use styles consistently across deliverables

• Keep sections in the same order across deliverables

• When formatting must differ, base new media objects and publishing templates on the originals (i.e., duplicate then modify). Use the Replace rules to swap out the originals with the new ones. Do not be tempted to manually change the formatting in a published file. Let the system automate the formatting for you wherever systematically possible.


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Configure your library to support each audience

Use answers to the preceding questions to help you configure your library by audience.

• Identify the styles, templates, and media objects that will be applied to your common content.

• Create a set of styles, templates, and media objects for each audience.

• Create a variable with a list of values for each audience type. This variable will be tagged to object templates as metadata.

• Assign the metadata variable and corresponding value to each audience-specific template. Objects based on that template will inherit the metadata variable and value. This variable will be used by a Filter rule to remove objects.

• Create a Do Not Publish (a) character style and a Do Not Publish (p) paragraph style. Disable all output checkboxes on each style’s General tab. These styles will be used by Replace rules to remove text.

Define your publishing profiles

Now that your library is configured, you can put together your publishing profiles and rules for each deliverable. Each profile will have the combination of rules that replace/remove the formatting and content based on the audience's specific needs. You’ll want one profile per deliverable and output (e.g., one for Instructor Guide Word and one for Instructor Guide PDF). Should you need more than one publishing profile with the same rules, but different output, configure one publishing profile and then duplicate and change the output in the duplicate.


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Create a test book

Once all the pieces are in place, create a small test book that contains common and audience-specific content at the object, paragraph, and/or character style level. Publish the book using your new deliverable-based publishing profile.

• Has the correct content or publishing template replaced the original?

• Has the correct content been filtered out at the object, paragraph, and/or character level?

Spread the word and get started

With the configuration in place and the strategy tested and adjusted where necessary, it’s time to document and train authors on using the new solution. You may consider choosing to execute your new strategy on a new documentation project instead of retrofitting existing materials if time is an issue.


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Conclusion Author-it publishing profiles are a powerful tool for transforming content into multiple, highly customized deliverables. Their flexible, adaptive rules that replace or filter out content and templates are especially effective for managing content for multiple audiences in a single book. Managing less content leads to greater reuse and decreased maintenance and review times. With some upfront analysis and configuration, you can implement a solution that enables you to write less and publish more deliverables that meet the unique content needs of diverse audiences.


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Write Less Publish More Handout