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We are writing documentation for several of our software applications. Those documentation documents share some common content fragments (eg corporate profile, etc.).

I need to find some decent software that would allow us to manage the formatting of those document consistently. It would be best if it would be possible to edit some global styling preference, and then, each time a document is published, it should reflect the updated styling.

Also, the document consist of several fragments (the common parts like company introduction and the product-specific or document-specific parts). It would be very nice if it would be possible to select the needed fragments and assemble documents from them.

Does anybody have experience with this?

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    Word supports using templates.
    – Ramhound
    Feb 20, 2014 at 14:03
  • I know that, of course... but I'm looking for something more complex. Word cant assemble the document fragments, its styling options have limits and its problem to ensure style updating related to some central style definition.
    – Ondrej
    Feb 20, 2014 at 14:28

2 Answers 2

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You can use a template together with the Automatically update document styles to sync the style formatting from the template.

To define reusable fragments of content look into using Autotext.

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I have particularly good experiences with Help & Manual from some Austrian company, see company site. We've been using it since 2004 and it is more flexible in publishing than Word. Topics are stored in XML format and can be generated by scripts. Files can be easily versioned using CVS or SVN.

We use one big project with over 2000 topics to generate the individual product manuals in one language. Some of the products include other products (for instance our project management solution comes with the query editor, which also is shipped as a separate product). Through build variables we control what to include in a specific product manual.

From the main language we also derive an English version. The Help & Manual project is processed by OmegaT, a computer aided translation tool, open source, but similar to Trados or Memoq. Compare Dutch version of manual (base language) and translated version

Everything can be run through Apache Ant build files.

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