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User & Service Manuals for India’s Leading Truck Manufacturer

A blog post describing the XML-based user manuals and service manuals for India's largest truck manufacturer

The Client

The client is one of India’s largest truck and commercial vehicle manufacturer.

The Requirement

The client had a well-defined, industry-standard format for the operations and maintenance manuals that were supplied with its trucks.

Group of parked semi trucks parked

However:

  • The client had no technical writing team; it was the engineering team team that updated the documentation.
  • The client had outsourced the layout and printing to a vendor who used Adobe Pagemaker for content layout.
  • For a given class of trucks, the content and document structure was reusable with just some specifications and procedures changing for a specific truck in that class. However, because the content was in Adobe Pagemaker and not reusable, there were separate manuals created for each type of truck that was manufactured.
  • The client team had to rely on the DTP vendor to update the manuals with the client-provided content and generate a PDF for review. This led to inordinate delays in finalizing documentation.
  • Any content change that affected multiple types of trucks would require individual manuals to be updated and then reviewed; yet another time consuming exercise.
  • Each manual had content in 2 languages, English and Hindi.
    • The content was written in English, translated to Hindi and then a separate set of manuals created with the Hindi content.
    • The entire manual was translated every time.
  • The client wanted to the option to publish the manuals in other Indian and European languages.
  • With the current setup, the client could deliver only PDFs f and not online versions of the documentation.

The client also had licenses for PTC Arbortext Editor that they had not been using but wanted to use.

The Solution: Topic-based Documentation Using DITA

The ibruk Consulting technical writing team first analysed the existing documentation and found that, for a given class of vehicles, ~80% of the content was reusable. As a result, the first thought was to define a content strategy that would enable the client reuse content where possible.

This client’s situation made DITA the obvious choice as the new documentation environment because we could:

  • create content as reusable topics
  • reuse content as and when needed
  • extract only updated content for translation
  • create content in any language
  • generate outputs in multiple formats, starting with PDF and HTML

More importantly, we couldĀ train the client’s Engineering Team quickly and easily to create standardised, reusable content using DITA’s Concept-Task-Reference content paradigm.

As a bonus the client could also use their existing licenses for PTC Arbortext Editor.

The DITA Implementation

Having decided on DITA, the ibruk Consulting technical writing team started by training the client’s Engineering Team on DITA. This helped them understand the content architecture as well as the practical aspects of authoring in DITA.

After the training was completed, the ibruk Consulting Content Strategy Team worked with the client’s team to:

  1. Analyse operation manual and service manual across 3 product lines
  2. Identify reusable content and define a content reuse strategy
  3. Define documentation process for converting the unstructured content into topic-based content using DITA as the standard
  4. Create a DITA Style Guide for the client’s Engineering Team

The ibruk Consulting team now worked with the client’s team to:

  • rewrite the existing content as DITA topics with the reusability implemented at various levels: map, topic and specific pieces of content within a topic
  • create standard bookmaps for various manuals

In parallel, another team at ibruk Consulting created a custom PDF generation plug-in. While we started with the default PDF plug-in in DITA-OT, we soon realised that it had its limitations. We then switched to Antenna House Formatter which offered greater scope and flexibility to customize the PDF output.

The end result was a DITA PDF Plug-in that flawlessly rendered:

  • the complex print layout that the client needed
  • Indian language content without errors

Tools Used

  • Arbortext Editor
  • Antenna House Formatter
  • DITA-OT

The Results

In a 3-month period, we were able to train the client team to use DITA to:

  • create and update content, including incorporating translated content
  • generate outputs

The client was very happy with the solution because:

  • the time to update documentation was reduced by 80%
  • the time to create new documentation was reduced by 70%
  • they owned the end-to-end process of creating and publishing content
  • they could generate outputs quickly and easily when required

The client is now preparing to implement a content management system (CMS) that would make their documentation environment which will take their documentation system.

1 Comment

  1. Pingback:15 Best Technical Writing Courses & Certifications on Udemy in 2023 – Lizamu

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