single sourcing

Single sourcing is the ability to write your document once
and distribute it in multiple formats.

Why you should consider single sourcing your documentation

Single sourcing your documentation will:

• Save time
  Content re-use saves time when your content producers are not re-developing existing information. New information is added as discreet modules leading to quicker document production.

• Save money
  Less time = less money.

• Improve Usability
  Focusing on information modules that are usable in all formats will generally improve the quality of the content.

• Improve Control
  Document assembly allows you to create documents that precisely meet the information needs of consumers. The granularity of controled access to information increase with modular content.

• Improve Collaboration
  Where the monolithic MS Word document allows only one editor at a time, modular documentation enables more contributors to work on information development.

So what is single source documentation?

Single sourcing at it's simplest is the ability to create and maintain once source document from which you can generate documents for multiple distributions channels. and distribute it in multiple formats.

From one document, for instance, you could create on-line web-based help, a printable PDF document and an Eclipse Infocenter. This has obvious advantages in that you have to maintain only one source document so that when the information changes you don't have to synchronise those changes in all your published documents.

However, when you start to think of the way in which the final documents are produced (written) and consumed (read), maintaining one large document to do all this is not particularly efficient or effective.

On-line information is consumed differently to printed documents. On-line help, for instance, is generally read one screen at a time; and related screens of information are a click away, so the information is not navigated in a linear fashion but more as a random-access pattern. On the other hand, the organisation and structure of printed material is generally sequential: it proceeds, for example, from basic knowledge to advanced concepts.

A question of style

The presentation, or formatting of content is different too. Printed material will be constrained to page formats ( "Letter" or "A5" etc.); and fonts that work well for paper documents are not so good for screen reading. Moreover, low resolution images may be acceptable for web pages but are not for production quality printed output.

So while the information may be the same for on-line and printed material, it is more effective to structure it differently as well as apply different formatting or presentation styles depending on the output.

Assembly line

If you are going to present your information differently in different channels, then why not also consider presenting different sets of information for different groups: beginners (newbies), operations, advanced users, management. Each group has different information requirements, although there will probably also be sets of information common to them all. It makes sense then to write information in small modules and join them together or assemble the modules according to the needs of the different sets of readers.

Single-source re-defined

Producing and maintaining modular information, like modular programming, has it's own challenges, and so the practice of single-sourcing is broader than the simple write-once-publish-everywhere concept we started with. This broader view of single-source documentation now includes:

• Modular writing
• Content Re-Use
• Content assembly (with the potential for dynamic assembly)
• Conditional processing