Write Less Publish More Handout

Write Less, Publish More
A presentation by:
Kendra Carter
Manager, Implementation and Consulting
kendra.carter@author-it.com
Adrian Winks
Solution Success Manager
adrian.winks@author-it.com

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Contents
Write Less, Publish More……………..………….……………………………………….……………3
Adaptive Solutions Based On Your Audience’s Needs…..………………………….……4
Highly Configurable, Infinite Possibilities……………………………………………………….9
Designing Your Deliverable Strategy……………………………………………………………10
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………..13
© Copyright 2014 Author-it Software Corporation.

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Write Less, Publish More
A common requirement within the Author-it Community is the ability to create
similar yet customized documentation for different audiences. For example,
Instructional designers produce an Instructor’s Guide and a Student
Guide for each course. The Instructor’s Guide has instructor notes,
delivery instructions, and exercise answers, whereas the Student Guide
does not.
Service documentation for internal field engineers has part information,
assembly diagrams, and assembly instructions. Sales gives potential
clients an alternate version where the assembly details are removed to
avoid proprietary information leaking to competitors.
Paper size, character, and paragraph formatting differ by local audience.
How can you create similar documentation without duplicating content or
maintaining multiple books? You need a solution that promotes reuse, decreases
maintenance, and as a very good friend of mine puts it, “has the system work for
you, not you working for the system.”

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Adaptive Solutions Based on Your
Audience Needs
Apply the power of publishing profiles to your content to automatically transform it
into different types of deliverables. These highly configurable and flexible objects
allow you to define publishing rules that adapt your content to your specific
audience needs.
Figure 1: Publishing profiles transforms books into customized deliverables
Outputs Deliverables
• MS Word
• PDF
• WinHelp
• HTML Help
• HTML
• XHTML
• JavaHelp
• Oracle Help for Java
• XML
• DITA
User Manual
Reference Guide
Web Help
FAQ
Policy and
Procedure
Online Help
Slideshow
Installation
Guide
Newsletter
Field Level Help
Handheld Help

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By putting a robust deliverable strategy in place, you can maintain the
documentation for all audiences in a single book. Why manage all audiences in one
book?
• Helps prevent authoring similar content in related deliverables
• Increases reuse by having more visibility into content
• Reduces time maintaining the content across multiple books
• Improves consistency and standardization
• Decreases review time by removing redundancy
Let’s explore three common tactics to transform a single book into multiple, highly
customized deliverables by audience.
Replace the publishing template
Let’s say you are an OEM partner, or the look of your client-facing material is
different from your internal documentation. You simply create a new publishing
profile and map to another branded template. As long as your style usage is
consistent, you can publish the same content to different looks automatically.
Figure 2: Replace the publishing template with another one

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Replace one object for another like object
A Replace rule can replace the Instructor Guide title page with the Student Guide
title page, or replace portrait-orientation media objects with landscape media
objects. One very handy trick is to replace a publishing style with a non-publishing
style.
Figure 3: Non-publishing character style Figure 4: Non-publishing paragraph style
A non-publishing style is one that has no output checkboxes enabled on the
General tab. This type of rule removes content based on certain styles from the
published document.

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Figure 5: Replace one object for another life object
Filter Out Objects Based On Certain Criteria
While Replace rules swap out like objects, Filter rules remove objects entirely. Filter
rules look for objects that meet predefined conditions, such as having a certain
release state assigned or having a certain variable assignment. When the condition
is met, the object or parent-child object group is not published.

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Figure 6: Filter out content based on criteria
You can define a list of Filter rules.

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Highly Configurable, Infinite Possibilities
What makes publishing profiles so powerful is their flexibility. You can combine
some or all of these tactics in infinite possibilities to create a solution that adapts to
your audience’s specific needs. The key is to create a publishing profile for each
deliverable and combine the various rules to completely automate the publishing of
multiple deliverables by audience from a single book.
The rules take into consideration content at various levels: content can be
manipulated at the publishing template level; the object level; and down to the
paragraph or character style level. And rules can be combined in a flexible array of
options. For example,
Localize a US English document design to Hebrew by combining
rules in a “Hebrew PDF” publishing profile that replaces a “US Letter”
publishing template with a “Right-to-Left” configured template and
replaces all US Letter media objects with A4 media objects.
Combine rules in a “Student Guide” publishing profile that replace
Instructor Guide-specific styles with the Do Not Publish style and
filters out objects assigned the GuideType variable value of
Instructor Guide.
Note: Combine rules in an “Instructors Guide” publishing profile in
the same manner, but vice versa.
Combine rules in a client-facing “Product Sheet” publishing profile
that replaces the internal publishing template with the highly
branded sales version and filters out objects assigned the
InternalOnly variable value of Yes.

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Designing Your Deliverable Strategy
Defining a robust deliverable strategy to meet the unique needs of your audiences
requires upfront analysis, a little experimentation, and testing. Our recommended
approach includes, at minimum, the following steps.
Analyze your content and audience
Get to know your audience and what content will meet their needs. Then,
answer these questions.
• What is the common “core” content across each deliverable?
• What content is unique to each deliverable type?
• Is the content unique at the object, paragraph, or character level? A
combination of all three?
Standardize your formatting and order
To help manage all of your deliverables in a single book, follow these best
practices:
• Use styles consistently across deliverables
• Keep sections in the same order across deliverables
• When formatting must differ, base new media objects and publishing
templates on the originals (i.e., duplicate then modify). Use the
Replace rules to swap out the originals with the new ones. Do not be
tempted to manually change the formatting in a published file. Let the
system automate the formatting for you wherever systematically
possible.

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Configure your library to support each audience
Use answers to the preceding questions to help you configure your library by
audience.
• Identify the styles, templates, and media objects that will be applied to
your common content.
• Create a set of styles, templates, and media objects for each audience.
• Create a variable with a list of values for each audience type. This
variable will be tagged to object templates as metadata.
• Assign the metadata variable and corresponding value to each
audience-specific template. Objects based on that template will inherit
the metadata variable and value. This variable will be used by a Filter
rule to remove objects.
• Create a Do Not Publish (a) character style and a Do Not Publish (p)
paragraph style. Disable all output checkboxes on each style’s General
tab. These styles will be used by Replace rules to remove text.
Define your publishing profiles
Now that your library is configured, you can put together your publishing
profiles and rules for each deliverable. Each profile will have the combination
of rules that replace/remove the formatting and content based on the
audience's specific needs. You’ll want one profile per deliverable and output
(e.g., one for Instructor Guide Word and one for Instructor Guide PDF).
Should you need more than one publishing profile with the same rules, but
different output, configure one publishing profile and then duplicate and
change the output in the duplicate.

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Create a test book
Once all the pieces are in place, create a small test book that contains
common and audience-specific content at the object, paragraph, and/or
character style level. Publish the book using your new deliverable-based
publishing profile.
• Has the correct content or publishing template replaced the original?
• Has the correct content been filtered out at the object, paragraph,
and/or character level?
Spread the word and get started
With the configuration in place and the strategy tested and adjusted where
necessary, it’s time to document and train authors on using the new solution.
You may consider choosing to execute your new strategy on a new
documentation project instead of retrofitting existing materials if time is an
issue.

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Conclusion
Author-it publishing profiles are a powerful tool for transforming content into
multiple, highly customized deliverables. Their flexible, adaptive rules that replace
or filter out content and templates are especially effective for managing content for
multiple audiences in a single book. Managing less content leads to greater reuse
and decreased maintenance and review times. With some upfront analysis and
configuration, you can implement a solution that enables you to write less and
publish more deliverables that meet the unique content needs of diverse
audiences.

Write Less Publish More Handout

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