Single-source manuals

Because corporations today face fierce international competition, they must produce and maintain high-quality documentation-but at minimal cost. Optimizing a writer´s time and effort will no doubt become a key study area as we try to do more with less, without sacrificing quality. One way to increase a technical writer´s productivity is to design documentation so that it covers a broader product area. This approach gets more use (or reuse) of the text. The paper describes the productivity and cost benefits of creating single-source manuals, that is, two or more manuals output from the same set of source files created and updated by one writer. It also describes how to create single-source manuals based on an actual case