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Word and XML for single sourcing books
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 |