Content re-use definition
Content re-use is a means of improving efficiency by eliminating repetition of phrases, blocks of text, topics, and even collections of topics.
The term content re-use means different things to different authors and tool vendors, just as the term single-sourcing means different things. Sometimes, those terms are used as glib marketing jargon. DITA supports a maximal implementation of content re-use.
Content re-use is achieved through the following strategies:
- Creating multiple deliverable documents from the same source project.
- Assembling a deliverable document by defining the sequence and hierarchy of content from topics selected from a shared repository.
- Defining conditional publishing rules, where content can be omitted or included depending on the specification of the deliverable document.
- Automated processing of a document's source to extract and re-assemble the content when creating a deliverable document.
- Transcluding content snippets from one topic into another topic.
- Using separately-maintained variables for repeated words or phrases.