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Styles, Document Conversion,
& Single Sourcing
Styles are efficient; they improve usability; and they promote a consistent corporate image -- so they have been favored by leading companies for years.
Other companies, however, have decided to pass. That is becoming harder to do:
- Document conversion and single-sourcing require compatible styles;
- Web pages cannot use markup features developed after HTML 4.0 (Dec. 97) without attaching a style sheet.
Company Styles
Advantages of Styles
Styles are, basically, standardized parts: the essence of the industrial revolution extended to formatting. They provide the following advantages:Efficiency. Because you use the same part over, you can create documents more quickly. During text revision, the efficiencies are nearly as pronounced; and if you revise the formatting, the efficiencies are huge, because one change at the style level ripples throughout the documentation. During conversion between media, use of styles is no longer just efficient; it's virtually required (see below).These are powerful advantages.
Usability. Readers of technical documentation like to know what's coming and to recognize it immediately when they see it; this is particularly true online, where the screen display suffers from tunnel vision. Styles help provide this predictability, and both retrieval and retention are dramatically improved as a result.
Appearance. Because identical parts are identical, all your documents look as similar as you choose to make them. People get to know you and recognize your materials.
What Scribble & Count Can Do
We can create MS Word templates, boilerplate, and macros that will speed up your documentation process, create consistency that users need, and provide a corporate image you can be proud of. These styles will convert to WinHelp virtually unaided, and will be compatible with HTML's Cascading Style Sheets (both CSS1 and CSS2), as far as CSS (and browser support) goes. The Archive contains a 6-pp. white paper on styles (PDF, 52K) and a 12-pp. excerpt from a client's style guide (also PDF, 52K).A brief scoping session to determine the extent of the project is free and without obligation.
Document Conversion & Single Sourcing
Computers are mindless -- but they are mindless very, very fast. Give them perfectly compatible styles, and they can convert any sized document from one medium to another almost instantaneously.The key here, obviously, is "perfectly compatible". Perfection doesn't exist (even with Word-to-WinHelp); but with careful planning, the styles can mesh so well that manual tweaking is inexpensive and so quick that deadlines are met.
Other Conversion Factors
Technically single sourcing requires only an original document (normally, but not necessarily, in print) and styles carefully designed to facilitate the conversion. Most documents, however, benefit from different treatment in the various mediums. This consists of audience analysis (to determine differences in use) and an organizing and writing technique known as "chunking".Scribble & Count has been doing both for years. After a classic audience issue in 1994, we wrote an essay on audience analysis, and our bibliography lists several client documents that were produced in both print and online mediums. S&C's owners have also spoken about conversion at several conferences, and the following materials are in the Archive: Denver STC (Nov 1997); Salt Lake City STC (June 1998); Region 7 (Denver, 1998); Region 7 (Seattle, 1999).
What Scribble & Count Can Do
There is so much variation in client needs that an initial assessment (either as a stand-alone or as the first stage of a conversion project) is necessary. Then, depending on the conclusions of the assessment, S&C can:- make only those changes to your existing styles to permit conversions;
- divide ("chunk") the document to permit different coverage in different media;
- reorganize and rewrite for more effective single sourcing.
Internet Display (XHTML & XML)
The World Wide Web followed hard on the explosion of desktop publishing: when tech writers (and their clients and employers) discovered what could be done with DTP in print, they tried to duplicate the effect on the Web. The results were disappointing, and the effort corrupted HTML from a language that describes data to one that formats it.The W3C is determined that this will not happen again. HTML has undergone its last revision (4.01); all future development will proceed in XML and XHTML, and to take advantage of future developments, every Web page will need a compatible style sheet. Web pages without styles will be left at 4.0 status (which, except for a few features such as text wrap around images, is no more than HTML 3.2). In a few years, that will look like what an HTML 2.0 page looks like today: a museum piece.
| Note: | Our first Website was done in HTML 2 (1994); we looked at it the other day, and winced. (No, we're not going to show it to you; but trust us: you don't want your pages to look like that in a few years.) |
The answer is style sheets -- and the more compatible with your other documentation, the better.
What Scribble & Count Can Do
S&C can design a CSS1-compatible style sheet and attach it to your Web pages. Both CSS2 (released but not yet supported by browsers) and XSL (still a working draft) support all aspects of CSS1; so, although any style sheet you develop now will require expansion, nothing will have to be undone in the future. Any project to develop a CSS1 style sheet can be coordinated with your single sourcing efforts (see Document Conversion / Single Sourcing section above).As usual, an initial scoping session is free and without obligation.
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Rev. 11-Nov-01
Related Options:
sample style guide | Audience Analysis (essay) | Styles white paper
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