Single sourcing with MindTouch

What is single-sourcing?

Single-sourcing (also known as "dynamic publishing," "dynamic enterprise publishing" or "multi-channel publishing") allows organizations to:

• publish from a single source document to multiple output document formats (examples: PDF, Word, CHM, HTML) in an automated form
• promote content re-use by using the same content across the different output documents

Single sourcing is important because it allows tailored documentation in the best format to the end-user. It also reduces the cost of developing documentation by automating the process of creating different formats - only one document needs to be updated in order for the different formats to be updated.

Setting up a single sourcing process is expensive, as the automation process must be tailored to each organization and the documents they have in-house.

How does MindTouch do single-sourcing?

With every single-source solution, the source format must be determined - it is, by and large, XML. MindTouch uses XHTML as its storage engine, which is a part of the XML markup family. By using XHTML, MindTouch is natively storing the data in the open language of the web, instead of a proprietary locked-in XML format.

The benefits of using XHTML are that we build on top of mature technologies that work. XHTML and CSS are a fantastic combination for creating a presentation layer, and help promote the separation of presentation and content, which is a requirement for succeeding with single-sourcing systems.

With MindTouch, individual pages are authored using the Intelligent Documentation Framework, which automatially associates metadata (via tags) to the content. Users can also submit their own tags on a page to be able to automatically classify them later. IDF, being targeted for web use, automatically creates a self-organizing navigation around the content. This fulfills the web publishing component of single-sourcing.

To create a portable print source (PDF, HTML, DOC), a user creates a PDF master layout using DekiScript (the scripting language inside MindTouch). This master layout uses search and content transclusions to assemble content into a single document. This document can then be added with the necessary print-oriented items (Table of Contents, etc.) Once this master layout is assembled, the "Print to PDF" functionality can be used to generate a PDF. HTML (and by assocation, .DOC files, since Word opens HTML files) can also be generated in a similar fashion.

As changes are made in the source documents, the master layouts are also dynamically updated, which can then be used to generate new PDFs on-request.

A note about customization

Because the end output formats vary from organization to organization, a platform with a high degree of customizability is critical for the success of single publishing systems. In that regards, MindTouch excels in this story - with our REST-based API which outputs XHTML, it becomes very easy to snap-in solutions which can output to different formats. We can take advantage of XHTML converters (PrinceXML is the best example) - this offers a huge benefit over using a proprietary XML storage format.

Each organization has different needs with single sourcing: MindTouch's use of standardized data formats, structured authoring tools (IDF), and the platform's extensibility serves the single-sourcing story very well.