Often business documents, such as sales proposals and annual reports, are a joint effort between various people and departments. It involves collaborative writing and incorporating existing content. For printable documents, this collaboration can make it really difficult to maintain a consistent level of quality, writing style and “look and feel”. For Technical Communicators, there’s an… Read more »
Tag: single sourcing
So what is Single Sourcing and what is DITA?
Single Sourcing reduces the need to create and maintain duplicate content, by enabling you to use existing “chunks” of content. This means you can have the same information in different publications, and you can have a library of existing content to re-use when you’re developing new documents. The content is stored independently of the formatting,… Read more »
What an Accountant can teach a Technical Author about single sourcing
Many people struggle to see the difference between cutting and pasting and true single sourcing. It’s difficult to come up with an analogy that people understand. One way is to compare single sourcing to accountancy, and look at the impact financial software has had on book-keeping and accounting. Before the days of computers, companies would… Read more »
The infinitely reusable document
Alongside Education and Publishing, Design is a profession from whom Technical Communicators can learn a great deal. The BBC TV series, The Genius of Design, looked at new trends towards green, “cradle to cradle”, design, where components in objects are designed to be capable of being stripped down and reused infinitely. I’ve never head anyone… Read more »
Technical writing company creates single source cost reduction calculator
We’ve added a further simple online calculator to the Cherryleaf Web site. This one is for calculating the potential savings in support costs derived from a single sourcing content management system. See our Single Source Cost Reduction Calculator page. We’re also developing a more comprehensive spreadsheet to help you measure the value of documentation. Contact… Read more »