preparing topics for external review

[pdenchfield]

Please improve my process! Below are my steps for preparing review copies. Flare 10, Windows 7.

Requirements:
* Compliance: Tagging must be completed for regulatory.
* Localization: Content must be written and updated with localization in mind. (translation database is used)
* PDF output: Reviewers prefer PDFs for markup.

Steps to prepare review copies:
1. In the Flare topic, when relevant, add the item number for compliance and then apply the compliance conditional tag to the item number. This tagging ensures that the item number is excluded from the output.
2. Annotate updated content to indicate changes made. When needed, add annotations showing old (deleted) content.
3. In the Flare TOC file z-ReviewCopy.fltoc, add those topics needing review.
4. From the Flare target file ReviewCopy.fltar (set to exclude compliance tags), build the PDF.
5. In Adobe Acrobat, highlight the updated content as indicated by annotations in the corresponding Flare topics. When needed, add annotations in the PDF to show old (deleted) content. Send on to reviewers.
6. When review comments are received, update content in Flare topics, then repeat steps 2-5.

To finalize content for localization:
* When approval is received, as time allows, remove annotations for approved content. Leave annotations if rushed. Send on to localization.

[ChoccieMuffin]

I only have one suggestion that might save you some time, if I've understood what your item number for compliance is. If it's the same number for each topic (and sometimes it changes), how about inserting a variable in the topic and then update the variable in the project whenever you need to change it?

As for the rest of the process, I'm afraid I can't add anything useful.

Aha, I've had an idea! (spot the light bulb). Note this is just an idea, I haven't tried it out and it might fail miserably, but here goes.

1) In your stylesheet, create a generic called .new, and give it a background colour. When you add new content, apply the .new attribute. (This can be to a paragraph, heading, span, etc).
2) In your stylesheet, create another generic called .deleted and give it a different background colour (perhaps add strikethrough as a font attribute as well, for clarity when you use it.) When you delete content, rather than adding extra comments in your topic, apply the generic style.
3) Produce your output. (I'm assuming you have a separate TOC and target because you only send the topics that contain changes, is that right?)
This is the bit that you'd need to test...
4) When you get your review comments back, apply the comments and repeat the review cycle.
5) When the review is complete, use FAR to delete stuff with the .deleted class. (You might need to think about how to do this, but I'm confident it can be done.)
6) Use FAR, or even Flare's own find and replace, to remove the .new tags. (Search in source code to delete class="new")

See if that makes things easier. It removes the need to mark up the PDF and cleans up the localisation source material.

Hope that helps.

[pdenchfield]

Hi ChoccieMuffin,

Thanks for your suggestions!

Regarding the compliance tagging, it's typically unique identifiers unfortunately, so variables wouldn't work.

Regarding the .new and .deleted classes, would it be possible to apply these in addition to other classes, such as paragraph tags and character tags? If so, I"m going to go to town testing this.

Best,
Pamela

[ChoccieMuffin]

I believe it IS possible to have two classes applied to a tag at the same time but I seem to remember you can only do it by editing in the text editor (note that I could be wrong so don't take that as gospel). Wait a moment or two and I'm sure a proper expert will be along to answer.

CM

[LTinker68]

I believe it IS possible to have two classes applied to a tag at the same time but I seem to remember you can only do it by editing in the text editor (note that I could be wrong so don't take that as gospel).

Correct, you can't do it via the Flare Styles pane. If you go into the code, you can manually add the second style. So <p class="note"> becomes <p class="note warning">. Style cascading still applies, so if there's a conflict of styles, the second class ("warning" in this case) wins.

[Msquared]

I already do something similar with special "review" stylesheets (which are used by my "Review" targets, which I note you already use).

I define several review styles (more in a minute) with different settings in my review stylesheet and my standard stylesheet. The main requirement here was that the review styles show as required when the review target (and stylesheet) is used, but look "normal" if the standard outputs are built.

My other requirement was that review styles should be easy to add/remove without corrupting the styles of the underlying content. So that's one reason why I'm very wary of using span styles here, however they are applied, as removing them will be error prone.

My review stylesheets inherits from my standard one, and define the special review style requirements on top.

The review styles.

I have three different "annotation" styles (just so I have the flexibility to direct different reviewers to different sections in the same document). I have two different colour highlight styles and a red text style. All these are defined as divs, so application/removal is easy. I just unbind the div and the underlying content reverts to how it looked before. In the standard stylesheet, these styles do nothing, so if the annotation gets left in, the text appears in the production output, but it isn't highlighted or red.

I have a "comment" style too. I use this in the same way as a Word comment. I've set it to pale blue background, and dark blue italic text. Text in this style is always completely hidden in production output. When I want to get rid of it, I just select it and delete it. Here I've defined a span style and a paragraph style. I decided not to use a generic style, for some reason I can't remember unless I dig out my original notes. But I do remember that if I used a generic style, I was able to apply this in a way that could cause problems later.

[pdenchfield]

Thank you, Marjorie. Great ideas--and thanks for detailing the background thinking as well. I will try out your review styles in the next week or so and get back to you!