Re: Single Sourcing in Framemaker

["Guy K. Haas" <guy -at- hiskeyboard -dot- com>]

On 9/5/2008 6:39 AM, Ronquillo, Michael wrote:
> The previous Tech Writers at my company single sourced a book for three
> brands. I'm finding it a huge chore with conditional text, mainly with
> respects to spacing and hard returns. As the books get larger it's even
> more of a chore because I have to find every single instance. I wish it
> was just show/hide conditional text, and bam your book does not have to
> be inspected.
> 
> 
> Having said that, has anyone ever successfully single sourced books in
> Framemaker? Is it even worth your time, or should I just create separate
> books for each brand to save the headaches and time?
> 
>  
> 
> TGIF!

Michael--

At Selectica, I single-sourced 4 1/4 books from one family of FrameMaker 
5.5 files.

I started with an API guide for use with the C language; the API 
accepted typical parameters and returned a data structure.  Then they 
developed the same API (same functions, same parameters, same sequence 
of arguments) for use with Visual Basic.  It returned a VARIANT (cousin 
of a data structure) and a succeed/fail value.  So each routine had 
EITHER this return or that one, and each VB routine had an extra parameter.

THEN they opted to do versions of the same 2 API that returned XML 
strings instead of structures/variants.

THEN, they did an API for the same back end in Java -- I was able to 
adapt the introductory, conceptual material to use it there as well.

Basically it amounted to creating topics (one per function) with Frame 
variables, conditional text, and text insets providing the differing 
elements.

--Guy K. Haas
   Software Exegete in Silicon Valley
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