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With support for DITA, I tend to say Adobe FrameMaker comes with everything you need out-of-the-box.
In a basic form, you could just create a DITA Topic like the following example, and give it to your developpers. They can parse this xml and pull out the strings they need. They can use simple xpath expressions like //uicontrol[@id="file"] to pull the string they need.
And you can use it as a repository to reference the UI strings in the documentation (based on their IDs). You can also use this file to send it through a translation process (all CAT tools support DITA these days), or convert it to XLIFF with FrameMaker to have everything under your own control.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE topic PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Topic//EN" "topic.dtd">
<topic id="fmp-10-ui-strings" product="FMP-10" platform="windows" xml:lang="de-DE">
<title>UI Strings für FMP-10</title>
<body>
<section id="main-menu">
<uicontrol id="ok" translate="no">OK</uicontrol>
<uicontrol id="cancel"><shortcut>A</shortcut>bbrechen</uicontrol>
<menucascade id="file-menu" xml:lang="de-DE">
<uicontrol id="file">Datei</uicontrol>
<uicontrol id="file-open">Öffnen …</uicontrol>
<uicontrol id="file-save">Speichern …</uicontrol>
<uicontrol id="file-save-as">Speichern unter …</uicontrol>
</menucascade>
<wintitle>Messergebnisse</wintitle>
</section>
<section product="FMP-10" platform="windows" id="dialog-measurement-results">
<title>Messergebnisse</title>
<wintitle>Messergebnisse</wintitle>
<uicontrol id="string1" status="new">Wählen Sie hier Messserie:</uicontrol>
<uicontrol id="string2" status="changed">Messserie {n}:</uicontrol>
</section>
</body>
</topic>
As you can see, DITA comes with elements like menucascade, wintitle, and uicontrol to mark up your content. You can introduce others if needed through specialization.
You could also make it a little more convenient to work with for the tech writers by putting it in a table and offer additional columns, e.g., for internal comments. Like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE topic PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Topic//EN" "topic.dtd" [
]>
<topic id="fmp-10-ui-strings" platform="windows" product="FMP-10" xml:lang="de-DE">
<title>UI Strings für FMP-10</title>
<body>
<section id="main-menu">
<table frame="all" colsep="1" rowsep="1">
<tgroup cols="2" colsep="1" rowsep="1" outputclass="adobetcs">
<colspec colnum="1" colname="1" colwidth="50*"/>
<colspec colnum="2" colname="2" colwidth="50*"/>
<thead>
<row rowsep="1">
<entry colname="1">UI String</entry>
<entry colname="2">Internal Comment</entry>
</row>
</thead>
<tbody>
<row rowsep="1">
<entry colname="1">
<uicontrol id="file">Datei</uicontrol>
</entry>
<entry colname="2">Hauptmenü Name</entry>
</row>
<row rowsep="1">
<entry colname="1">
<uicontrol id="file-open">Öffnen …</uicontrol>
</entry>
<entry colname="2">Öffnet den Dialog zur Dateiauswahl</entry>
</row>
<row rowsep="1">
<entry colname="1">
<uicontrol id="file-save">Speichern …</uicontrol>
</entry>
<entry colname="2">Speichert die Datei einfach nur</entry>
</row>
<row rowsep="0">
<entry colname="1">
<uicontrol id="file-save-as">Speichern unter …</uicontrol>
</entry>
<entry colname="2">Öffent den Dialog zum Speichern der Datei</entry>
</row>
</tbody>
</tgroup>
</table>
</section>
</body>
</topic>
(See attachment "UI-Example-Table.xml")
In Adobe FrameMaker it looks like this for the author:
Cheers,
Stefan
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