Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems, Volume 11

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2017F106

Citation: Proceedings of the 2017 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, M. Ganzha, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki (eds). ACSIS, Vol. 11, pages 1325–1334 (2017)

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Abstract. Similar documents arise in software and business situations. Examples are user guides for different versions of a software product, contracts between vendors and clients, and legal documents. The usual practice is to capture similarities in templates that must be copied and manually customized to a new context -- often a slow, tedious, and error-prone process. We propose a method based on proven approach developed for software reuse that simplifies and automates routine tasks involved in creating and updating families of similar documents. Document Management Environment (DME) provides functions to create templates and to generate custom documents from them. We identified seven types of variations typically found in similar documents. Any arbitrary document part can be designated as template's variation point, and the same inter-dependent customizations occurring at different variation points can be streamlined. We developed DME to automate generation of documentation of multiple software products (e.g., in reuse via Software Product Line approach). The paper describes two ``proof of concept'' implementations of DME as Word add-in: The first one uses Content Control mechanism and is specific to MS Word. The second one is based on ART (Adaptive Reuse Technique), a general text manipulation method and tool, and can be used to manage similar documents in any editor that provides an access to its internal textual representation of documents.

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