The ZENPRESS ManualMaster
Earlier, we discussed four different kinds of publication molds, for four different kinds of publications. The ZENPRESS ManualMaster generates publications that are substantially different from our magazines.
The ZENPRESS ManualMaster generates technical reference manuals. It generates them in two different forms, a User Manual and an API (Applications Programming Interface) Reference Manual. This is ideal for technical programming documentation as automatic generation of technical manuals avoids link rot commonly associated with complex, changing documents.
Back before we officially became ZATZ Publishing, we had a software product called FileFlex, which we have since sold to a former employee. But at that time, we had updated FileFlex to a substantially new version and we needed to generate a new manual for it. We figured that doing an online manual made a lot of sense and since we had ZENPRESS, it would be interesting to see what would happen if we created a publication mold that would do manuals.
So, we built the ManualMaster mold for ZENPRESS in just a few days and we had an entirely new kind of publication that we were able to generate online. The ZENPRESS ManualMaster takes in chapter files and function files, runs them through ZENPRESS and creates a User Manual, Table of Contents, and the various chapters, as well as an API Reference Manual Table of Contents and a Web page for each function call.
The User Manual is organized into chapters, each chapter has subheadings, the Table of Contents is automatically built from the chapter titles and headings, and all of the individual function calls automatically turn into cross-referenced links to the appropriate definition in the API Reference Manual. This reuses many of the Smart Style Objects from the Journal Master.
The API Reference Manual works a little bit differently. It generates one page per API function call. The Table of Contents is automatically generated based on the individual API calls, and so you'll see, for example in Figure H, each API call with its definition on the Table of Contents.
The ManualMaster adds a variety of new Smart Style Objects, including .SYNTAX, .CATEGORY, .DESCRIPTION, .CHANGE, .EXAMPLE, and so forth.
Figure H. The ZENPRESS ManualMaster can cross-index function titles, names, and the Table of Contents entries in an API Reference Manual.
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