The situation at customer's site
The customer - an international corporate group in the field of medical engineering - publishes its documentation in HTML format in the Intranet, the OEM partners in Asia work with Word and publish on paper.
The target
The customer requirement is: A Word template is to be created which not only fulfils the requirements of the OEM partner regarding paper documentation, but also allows for a convertion to HTML, thus the OEM documents in the Intranet appear with the same look & feel as one's own.
In addition the specification of the OEM partner included the requirement that several 1000-page Word documents be created with this template.
The solution
As Word is not suitable for such large documents and due to the fact that the range of Word functions for the work with central and branch documents does not fulfil this task, a semi-automated solution had to be developed which represents a compromise between stability and degree of automation. Meanwhile a 6000-page documentation is created successfully with the template.
The second task was the conversion into HTML. To meet this requirement, a tool which had already been introduced into the company was used. This tool filters Word documents, reads out the structured contents, provides them with Markup acc. to the HTML rules and finally writes a clean HTML code.
The third task was to write a cascading stylesheet which imparts the HTML files the desired look.
And as fourth task a navigation structure based on XML had to be created. For this purpose the product manager creates an assignment table in Excel which is then converted into the desired XML navigation file at the press of a button. |
