Word and XML for single sourcing books

[Jose Valdes]

As a lone technical writer, I write and maintain several manuals (in MS Word
2003) for products that share many features. Often I reuse content between
these manuals. I am trying to decide whether I should use the XML features
in Word 2003 (or 2007) to shared content between these manuals.

For example, I have safety information that is shared by all product
manuals. It would be wonderful to single source this info, so that an update
to safety info could update all manuals. Also many of my manuals belong to
product lines and all manuals in a particular line share much of the same
info.

Has anyone used XML in Word 2003 or 2007 to single source content? Any
advice as to how well it works for this purpose?

After researching this issue a little, I'm somewhat confused by the options
for implementing XML in Word. I found a newsgroup posting that suggested
using Word as an XML editor for the DocBook schema. Another posting
suggested using XSL transformation in Word along with the <xslt:if> and
<xslt:choose> tags. I suspect there are many other implementations for
single sourcing, and I'd appreciate any advice as to which ones are easier
and simpler. By the way, I don't expect any option to be truly easy or
simple.

Thanks!José

PS - These are books that I'm thinking about buying: XML in Office 2003:
Information Sharing with Desktop XML by Charles F. Goldfarb and Priscilla
Walmsley and Office 2003 XML for Power Users by Matthew MacDonald

 

[Cindy M.]

Hi Jose,

As a lone technical writer, I write and maintain several manuals (in MS Word
2003) for products that share many features. Often I reuse content between
these manuals. I am trying to decide whether I should use the XML features
in Word 2003 (or 2007) to shared content between these manuals.

For example, I have safety information that is shared by all product
manuals. It would be wonderful to single source this info, so that an update
to safety info could update all manuals. Also many of my manuals belong to
product lines and all manuals in a particular line share much of the same
info.

Has anyone used XML in Word 2003 or 2007 to single source content? Any
advice as to how well it works for this purpose?

The XML features in Word don't really provide this, unless you're using a
transform to generate the documents dynamically.

More commonly, shared content is saved in one or more Word documents then
linked in using Insert/File (with a link). Under the covers, Word uses an
IncludeText field to manage the link.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail

 

[Jose Valdes]

Hi Cindy,

I am exhaustively using IncludeText in my documents thanks to your article,
"How to Use IncludeText Fields" at http://daiya.mvps.org/includetext.htm. I
was wondering whether XML would handle this issue better, but your reply has
set me straight. I'll continue using IncludeText.

Thanks! José