Figure 8 and 9 Synopsis

The following depicts what an XML authoring environment looks like. Figure 8 shows the cover page from the Technical Publications Style Guide in normal PDF style. My task at Southwest was to take the style guide that had been written in Adobe FrameMaker and convert it line by line to ArborText. See Figure 9 below for what the cover looks like in the ArborText editing environment. As you can see, each piece of text and graphic is bound by its “tag.” By building documents in XML tagged format, the department is able to make sweeping changes to documents, automatically record exactly what those changes were, and update the document company-wide. For example, the fields circled in blue are the revision number and the publishing date. In XML, the author can change the information in that one place, and subsequently everywhere else that information appears will reflect the new values. What allows this to happen is the fact that the values are bound by XML tags. Everywhere those tags appear in a document will receive the updated information automatically. The idea of single sourcing is present here, where instead of building one manual at a time as you would in MS Word, once you have a certain type of manual built in XML, say an operator manual, you can easily build a completely new operator manual for a different end user because the operator information is the same from book to book.