RE: single-sourcing and humble pie

["Bill Lawrence" <scribe -at- matrixplus -dot- com>]

I replied to Timothy off-list about what we do and how, but I thought
I'd throw in a little tidbit here.  I'm using XML-based single-source
documents, and they use quite a number of conditionalized passages of
text as well as conditionalized graphics.  It would be terribly
difficult to work this stuff  except that my XML editor, Arbortext Epic,
can quickly preview any combination of conditional variables.  It was
precisely that capability that made us purchase Epic and it works quite
well. I use five separate attributes to conditionalize text, and each of
those has multiple possible values. There are something on the order 36
possible document variations that I can generate from the single-source
XML files. 

With Epic, I simply need to add all of the variables to a configuration
file and it constructs a GUI with check boxes that let me pick what
variation I want to preview.  I don't think I could deal with the
complexity without this feature.

Bill Lawrence

Senior Technical Writer
Matrix Solutions


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