single-sourcing with automatic importing
(also posted to techshoret)
My apologies if I'm asking something trivial. I haven't used FrameMaker for a while and am not yet familiar with the most recent versions.
Problem statement: We have a User's Guide for a product that has multiple (~15) different flavors so we have that many guides. I would like to unify them into one guide with conditional text.
The basic format is the same for all flavors. The main difference lies in sections containing lists of parameters and their values; these change with each milestone of a flavor.
Whenever a product is built, the build process generates the relevant lists. These are then manually copied into the document for the specific flavor (a rather painful process). Each "flavor" requires several builds in the course of a year, so the tech writer needs to do all this around 50-60 times.
Engineering will provide me the information in whatever format I want (or so they say), and will place it in a drive that I can access. My plan is to import the data (File > Import > Object > Create from File) and link it so that when they change the data, it will be automatically updated in the Frame file.
What format should I ask for, and are there any tips on how to perform the import automatically?
I've tried importing from Word and Excel, but find it hard to implement the required fonts, sizes, etc. without having to edit the data afterwards.
Thanks!
Benzi
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