Been thinking about what we do, and what I do is improve the post-sales customer experience. What we do as content developers is incredibly important, because what we do helps people change the world.
Topic-based authoring is really the only way to develop. The day of the long monolithic content is gone. There is no business case for it, for big long PDFs, anymore.
When you're using topic-based authoring, you can distribute work better. Reviews get better. Is is easier to localize topics. It can force a logic to your content. It makes it easier for others to use your content, such as training.
Because topics are combined and recombined, because content is localized, language must be standardized. Otherwise, it looks like we were all drunk. But we are the voice of authority.
In Flare, there's no way to standardize the language (natively). It's a manual process.
If you're writing
On the File menu...
From the File menu...
Click File...
Select the file menu...
Choose the file menu...
...and more, your cost are increasing, especially if you're translating (at 25 cents per word).
Our users are depending on us talking about things one way. If we keep changing the way we talk about stuff, we will confuse our users.
Flare 9 has plugins now. HyperSTE is a Flare plugin designed for standardized English. It's configurable for style guides.HyperSTE is not as cheap as Flare, but if you're translating, it can save you lots of money.
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