Single Source Authoring Project

The Problem

As part of my TECM 5191 class, I worked in a group of three students who were tasked with taking a company’s printed instruction manuals and using them to create a prototype of a single-source solution within MadCap Flare.

The company (“The Tech Company”) needing assistance is currently relying on printed manuals that are time-consuming and expensive to update. They would also like the content in their manuals to be available to their customers through an online Help Center, something they don’t currently have.

The Solution

The decision to use a single-source authoring tool for this project was determined by the instructor, but this solution is undoubtedly the best one for The Tech Company. Using MadCap Flare, the company’s content can be broken up in to smaller pieces (called “topics”) and reused wherever it’s needed – whether that’s part of an online Help Center or a PDF they send their customers. Those topics can be updated whenever changes are made to their software, quickly and in one place.

To create the prototype, the content from the PDF version of The Tech Company’s printed manuals was imported into MadCap Flare. My team created a content model and content templates before working directly with the files in MadCap. Using the content model and template, the team then updated content headings and added metadata to each topic.

Once we completed our work with the files, we were able to easily build our prototypes: two print manuals (one for the products’s software and one for its hardware) and an HTML Help Center that uses content from both manuals.

PDF Manual

HTML Help Center

Project Skills