TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Conditional Text From:CARYN_RIZELL -at- HP-ROSEVILLE-OM2 -dot- OM -dot- HP -dot- COM Date:Tue, 23 Jan 1996 13:38:16 -0800
There is a conditional text solution in Word. It involves the mail merge
feature. One of my co-workers has been investigating this and found a way to
use single source in Word. She is almost finished with her research on this.
When she finishes, I will report back to anyone that is interested about how to
do this.
Having conditional text in Word makes a big difference to us, because we had
been looking at doing online help in Frame just for that reason. The problem is
that Frame is extremely clunky when it comes to creating online docs.
If you want to know what we found out re conditional text and Word, just let me
know and I will email you when we have ironed out the details.
Framemaker is designed to allow you use conditional text. I haven't used
it yet, but I understand that you simply apply conditional tags to the
text (you could use tags that identify the variants as well as the common
functionality). When you are ready to edit or print the document, you
simply identify which tags you want to see or print.
Kent Newton
Senior Technical Writer
Metrix, Inc.
kentn -at- metrix-inc -dot- com
----------
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 09:06:00 W
From: Steiner Franz <STEINERF -at- PCCEN -dot- AVL -dot- CO -dot- AT>
Subject: Customizing documents
Hello from Austria,
We are writing paper-documentation and online-help for a product that is
delivered in several (20 or so) different variants and with a bunch of
additional options. All of these variants have a great amount of
functionality in common. So we don't want to write and maintain seperate
documents for every variant. Our idea is to have a big overall document
that
can be configured according to the customers needs and printed on demand.
Our question is: Does anybody know of a tool that can help us to manage
this
task? We are currently working with MS Word 6.0 and Doc-to-Help 1.6.1
(probably upgrading soon) so it would be nice if these tools work
together.
Thanks in advance!
Franz Steiner
steinerf -at- pccen -dot- avl -dot- co -dot- at
Andreas Koeck
koecka -at- pccen -dot- avl -dot- co -dot- at
