Trends in automating document generation

Although some advocate their elimination, documents are the preferred and most effective way to communicate information in every engineering discipline. Documents (whether they be hard copy or electronic) are the evidence that engineering tasks have been performed. There are many commercial documentation packages that can help you define a document's format and structure. Which one you choose will determine what capabilities are available and the document's underlying representation. Current approaches for automating document generation are based on extending the facilities of software development tools and document publishing systems. Although these approaches provide some automation, they are still labor intensive. Today's approaches can be categorized as either push or pull.<
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