Database support for the production of reusable technical documentation

The approach to the production of technical documentation described arose from a need to supply documentation for a large library of mathematical software. There has been a growing demand to supply documentation in a variety of printed and online formats, tailored to the particular needs of end users. There is also an increasing number of new products which contain the original library as an embedded sub-component. First attempts to meet the demand for diverse forms of documentation led to the creation of many different bodies of text, containing similar information, but maintained and often authored separately. The solution to this problem was to develop a database which contains all the information previously held in the library documentation. The database can be used to generate both the original documents and new documents with varying style, format or content. There were two main processes involved in the transformation of documents to database records. The first was an object-oriented decomposition of the documented product, identifying all the sub-components and the important information relating to each one. The second process was to mark up text records using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), an ISO standard (8879) for the mark up of computer-held documents.<>