Structured authoring is a workflow for authoring that allows you to define consistent content organization using predefined rules. With all the benefits that structured authoring provides, this authoring style has become increasingly popular over the last few years. Let us look at some of the benefits of structured authoring in this article.
Structured authoring separates authoring from formatting that enables writers to focus on content. This is helpful when writers have to produce a lot of content.They can just write the topic without worrying about the formatting or layout as there are set rules or tags to use. This saves a lot of writer bandwidth
Structured authoring is written as small independent chunks or topics. Writers can combine or arrange these topics in various layouts using article maps and book maps to produce multiple outputs from the same content. For example, you can generate two flavors of the same product (on-premise and cloud).
Structured authoring also enables writers to produce outputs in multiple formats (web help, pdf, etc.) by pushing the same base content through multiple stylesheets.
Content is written in small topics or chunks that enables you to reuse them across various outputs. You can reuse some common feature content across different products or reuse common content across various flavors of the same product.
Since content is written in small topics, it also enables collaboration within writers. Two or more writers can simultaneously work on different features in the same product. This is especially helpful in large products where you have a large volume of content and hence multiple writers to cover all the content.
Structured authoring supports ditavals (or targets) and profiling (or conditions) that enables and simplifies the bundling of technical content. These features allow the formatting to be applied separately and dynamically on the output packages.
In addition, most of the CMS that are required to host structured content files, provide out-of-the-box publishing pipelines. If they don’t, they still automate some part of the overall process, for example, generating the output packages. You can then write and schedule your own scripts to push the packages to your output portals or other delivery locations.
Last but not the least, with the control on specific tags and other rules, structured authoring promotes consistency and hence efficiency in the authoring process. With specific rules, writers stick to the authoring part to avoid breaking builds/packages. This in turn makes it easy for the editors and publishers to manage the output.
Overall, structured authoring provides benefits that save time by separating authoring from publishing and reduce localization as well delivery costs.