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The first time I ever heard the term "modular document" was
around 1990-91, when a division of Xerox was attempting
to promote "custom document printing." In that early
incarnation, one would break up the documentation for a
system with multiple possible configurations into stand-
alone sections, and the end user or production specialist
could enter a given configuration into a print management
UI that would assemble and print a "custom manual" that
contained all the required sections and excluded the
extraneous ones. And, of course, if you used HW or SW
in multiple products, you'd be able to multipurpose the
sections as well. The original "custom manual" concept
came back again and again over the years in a number of
different schemes, each of which promptly sank like a lead
balloon. These days, the most common usage of the
term seems to relate to single-sourcing schemes like XML,
that break the "chunking" down into even smaller units and
appears, at least for the present, to have better prospects,
but so far I've yet to identify a fully developed tool that
will allow relatively easy repurposing of information to
print/pdf, online help *and* the web (by "relatively easy,"
I mean "less time and effort than it takes to copy/paste
and reformat;" if anybody thinks they've found one, by all
means, speak up).
Gene Kim-Eng
------- Original Message -------
On
Wed, 10 Sep 2003 08:05:36 -0600 (MDT) Eric J. Ray?wrote:
So,I'm looking for a consensus, of sorts, about what
technical writers mean by the term "modular documentation".
