I'd be interested in this, as having just started my new job, I'm finding that there are practises that haven't been adopted in some areas of the documents to limit the time that documents take to edit, that should have been because the tools that are used have not been used to their full potential.
Variables are great for stuff like creating templates (using them in headers, footers, for product names, copyright info). It would be good to get something whereby stuff like product names, copyright info can be changed in 1 place and it changes throughout the book, instead of going into every chapter and changing the variable content. I tend to find conditional text is a nightmare unless everyone is singing with the same hymn sheet, and it can get difficult to police, because it demands strict policies to be followed. It only takes one person to leave and it can throw the rest of the team into chaos. Chunking - again, how deep do you go? I'd suggest not getting silly by going down to sentence and word. We've got a section at work that is a prime candidate for chunking, but it's at chapter level. The same chapter is put in every book, so I think it would work well for the introduction chapters make up the Getting Started Guides. I'm pretty tired today as I'm in Liverpool after driving for 5 hrs, so if I think of anything or find anything, I'll comment further. Claire On 2 October 2010 03:51, Jean Hollis Weber <[email protected]> wrote: > Some of you have said you are experienced technical writers. If anyone > has experience with techniques for reusing common material, preferably > using OOo's features (variables; conditional text, paragraphs, sections; > etc.), please help me set up some methods and files and write the > instructions for using them. > > We want to develop methods that can be used by contributors without > detailed knowledge of how they work. TJ, Andrew, or other macro gurus > should be able to set up the necessary post-processing once we've worked > out what we're doing. > > Reusing material (such as PDF export) between books has been part of the > plan for OOo, and on my personal priority list, for some time -- but it > is now even more important and urgent for providing files that can most > easily be reused for other flavors of OOo such as LibreOffice. > > Please no disgressions into how much better FrameMaker or some other > tool is at doing this. Any tool that costs money is out, and any tool > that isn't easily comprehended by the majority of volunteers is out (so > no DocBook). OOo/LO is what we've got, and we should be using our own > product anyway. > > Jean > -- > Jean Hollis Weber > Co-Lead, OpenOffice.org Documentation Project > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > > -- Best wishes Claire Wood
