How can I provide two view-versions of a single document?

September 10, 2007 6:06 AM

How to write one document that translates into several targeted documents? In other words: how can I provide one kind of view on my thesis to people from university, who care about definitions of terms, literature references, methodical preambles, and another to other people who are also interested in sidebars and anecdotal evidence? Some parts of the text are relevant to both.

I'm hesitant about using a very hackerish approach like using my own extended form of Docbook XML and writing XSL stylesheets to provide the views. This incurs the risk that I'd be distracted by the hacking of the stylesheets from writing the thesis itself.

Another approach, in Word, would be to have two master documents that include shared word document parts. But I have the impression that including word document parts is rather brittle.

I'm not sure what kind of support Openoffice offers.

I'm very interested in experiences that people have with writing multi-view documents like this.

posted by jouke to Science & Nature (6 answers total)

Are you just wanting to produce two different documents from the same collection of source material? If this is the case, I would suggest LaTeX.
posted by tomcooke at 6:36 AM on September 10, 2007

First off, do you have any concrete reason to suspect that a nontrivial number of nonacademic people are interested in your thesis right now? I don't mean that to be snotty -- I'm sure that hardly anybody outside academia has any interest in my own work, and even most of those are relations and friends who don't really give a damn about it.

Anyway, unless you have nonacademic editors clamoring for it right now and they just can't wait, I would:

(1) Write the thesis as a full-on, no-shit academic document and forget the other version for now.
(2) When you're done with that, write the other version.

This incurs the risk that I'd be distracted by the hacking of the stylesheets from writing the thesis itself.

You're wise to think so. Writing a separate nonacademic version is also a distraction; do it later.

If you must do this, you can do it with LaTeX fairly easily. Just \include{} the relevant chunks of text for each one.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:55 AM on September 10, 2007

Response by poster: ROU_X: the people from the university who'll be judging the thesis obviously will be reading it.

Writing a separate nonacademic version is also a distraction; do it later.
That's a valid point.

tomcooke, I'm hesitant about restarting my comprehension of LaTeX. It's been more then 10 years... Another distraction. But maybe it's worth it.

Supposed I'd want to take the risk of distracting myself with writing of 2 documents at the same time, are there any other technical ways to this?
posted by jouke at 7:14 AM on September 10, 2007

I have to say I agree with ROU_X academic theses, even those that one thinks are scintillating are rarely, o-so-rarely of interest to those outside of academia. I would so recommend writing the academic one first and then chopping it up for a more 'commercial' source. I think you'll really save yourself a lot of time and frustration. I know that you want to do both at the same time, but I think you're just making things hard for yourself. Good luck with it, whatever you decide!
posted by ob at 7:49 AM on September 10, 2007

Response by poster: ob & ROU_X; yes, I have reasons to expect some people in my line of work, some architects at my company and at major governmental organisation, to be interested in my thesis.

But they'll be interested in the bottomline and not at all in the text that defends the research approach, the methodical grounding etc.

Thanks for answering "the question behind the question". :-)

I think I'll heed your advice and do both versions sequentially instead of in parallel. Composing 2 documents in parallel is significantly more difficult I guess.

Bedankt!
posted by jouke at 10:00 AM on September 10, 2007

In that case:

I would expect it to be somewhat more difficult, yes, because (at least in the US) academic writing is sufficiently different from normal writing that you couldn't expect to use even paragraphs from one. Unless Dutch academic writing is unlike that in the US, I think you'd find it easier to just load a completed copy of your thesis and start dropping the bits of ass-covering and enriching the language.

But the bigger point is that even if it weren't a lot more difficult, it's still a convenient time-suck, which are to be avoided.

You know your situation better than anyone else here. If the government agency wants to see something now, or if your employer can get you a promotion if they have the info before [DATE], then follow your incentives.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:22 AM on September 10, 2007