Versioning of Technical Documents — Design and Implementation

Abstract

Technical documentation differs from normal documentation as created by ordinary text processing systems in the following areas: Technical documents are often very large in size. Documents exceeding 1000 pages are no exception. Technical documents are created by a group of authors often working concurrently. Technical documents that describe a product have a long lifetime, which follows the progressive development of the product described. This development has to be supported by multiple versions of one document. Technical documents have to incorporate information from other sources (other documents, but also paper and remote computer systems). Since technical documents are generally complex, there is a need for management support for such documents. Since technical products are often designed as a series, e.g. configurations which differ in details only, the various documents describing the products also exist as close variants of each other.