You can significantly reduce the time required to create and maintain your documentation by structuring your projects to reuse content where possible. Content reuse refers not only to using the same source files to generate output in different formats (such as HTML Help and PDF guides), but also to reusing different content files across projects in your authoring environment. This allows you to make changes in one project (for example, to a branding color or contact information), and have your environment automatically apply those changes to all your projects—without requiring you to update each project individually. Single-sourcing can cover a wide array of content types, including:
- Common style sheets that define your brand and ensure a consistent look and feel across your output formats.
- Graphics that are common to multiple output formats, such as your logo, title graphics, and other branding images.
- Topic content that appears in multiple deliverables, such as legal matter, contact information, and descriptions of your documentation conventions.
In this tutorial, we'll look at one method for configuring the MadCap Flare authoring tool to share single-sourced content.