At 13:08 -0600 on 01/03/2014, Mark Zelden wrote about Re: SMF (was:
REXX tutorial):
As long there is internal communication within IBM and everyone
played by the same rules, the information could be kept consolidated
in a single manual or kept in sync with the component / subsystem
manuals.
The problem with doing updates when something changes in one
component is that the single SMF Record Format manual is that the
Dead Tree edition needs to be updated when a change in the text
changes. I am old enough to remember the days when these types of
changes were done with the pages being sent out and the user needed
to pull out the replaced pages and add the new ones to their copy of
the manual. Periodically a new version of the manual would be issued
that incorporated the page replacement changes. This is no longer
done. An electronic copy of the manual COULD be updated as needed and
assembled on the fly as needed. I do not know what DTP system that
IBM now uses but using InDesign or Quark as an example, you can
assemble a book that has each SMF record number as a separate chapter
and the master SMF Records manual would be assembled by just listing
the chapter names. Adding a new record number would just add the new
chapter pointer to the master list. This also creates the ToC and the
Index. For the Component manuals the record format chapters would
also be used so that any change in the chapter file would
automatically update both the Component manual and the master SMF
Record Format manual.
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