Single-source Publishing using Starfish UPTEP Method: Applications in Multilingual Web Site Development and Courseware Content Management

Single-source publishing has been known for decades as a method of creating and maintaining published content from a single source document, while generating different content forms. It has usually been associated with the maintenance of a system documentation and it has been implemented in specialized systems around certain particular document forms. We present a case that such an approach would be useful in an open-ended general area of text-based document management applications, such as creation and maintenance of multi-lingual web sites and courseware material maintenance in LaTeX. Such application areas are very dynamic and open in types of target text, which is used for further processing and document rendering, so a closed system for single-source publishing would not be appropriate. We demonstrate an approach using universal text preprocessing and text-embedded programming (UPTEP) that can be effectively used for this task. This solution approach is validated through the use of open-source Starfish system, which is a general UPTEP system. We show how the UPTEP approach to single-source publishing can be readily implemented using Starfish on the two case studies.