Background
Single-Sourcing
Structured Authoring
Collaboration
MadCap Flare
For my Digital Literacies course, I collaborated with a team to restructure and enhance content for a mock company using MadCap Flare. We began with two unstructured PDFs—a system hardware guide and a software configuration guide—which were converted into FrameMaker book files and imported into Flare. Our task was to organize and structure the content in order to enhance usability, allowing our client to transition to a single-sourcing system for their content.
Challenge
The content we started with was completely unstructured. In Flare, the content was broken up into several files based on the headings from the original PDFs.
As stated in the assignment description, the goals of the project were to demonstrate a single-source solution that would allow our client to:
- update content once across all related products and publications
- make content searchable online
- produce print for those customers who want it
- create consistency across the different content creators/approvers who own different parts of the related products
- personalize print content for different customers and product versions when possible
Our final deliverables included:
- one print installation guide and one print configuration guide as PDFs
- a searchable HTML5 website with the same content as the print guides
Results
Reference Template
This is the reference template that I created for my team. We used this template to standardize our content and ensure consistency in the final target files.
Topic File Example
This is a screenshot of a topic file once we adjusted it to match a template. The green highlights are keywords that we designated from the topic, making the HTML5 target searchable.
The Final Product
At the end of the project, we delivered all required elements (two print guides and one web HTML5 guide). Our team was praised for our consistent design and comprehensive, well formatted builds.
My Approach
Templating
The first thing my group did was create three templates–one for each type of topic in our inventory.
The three topic templates include:
- Tasks Topic: Task topics included a procedure of some kind. The main content in the content would help a user accomplish a goal.
- Reference Topic: Reference topics included information that users could refer to. Often this content included supporting material.
- Concept Topic: Concept topics included information users would need to understand a particular concept.
Once the templates were completed, we went through each file in the scope of our project and broke them down into individual topic files, classifying them as either task, reference, or concept, and editing the content to follow our templates.
The information about topics is mainly from the Heretto Technical Content Development Guide.
Building TOCs and Targets
Next, we were tasked with building the Table of Contents (TOCs). These TOCs are used by Flare to build and organize the topics in the final target files. I worked on the PDF versions of both the system hardware guide and the software configuration guide, following the original PDFs closely to ensure all content was ordered correctly.
After the TOCs were created, we were able to build our Targets. We built one target for print use, and one target for web use.