THE METHOD FOR SYNTHESIS OF MULTI-VARIANT DOCUMENTS USING LUALATEX

When developing documentation, a situation may arise when the documentation has several options for its presentation. In this case, its content is formed from two types of fragments: general  present in all documentation options and variable  included only in the documentation options for which it is intended. Development and modernization of such documentation without the use of specialized tools is a laborintensive process, which may be accompanied by errors due to the need to make adjustments to all duplicate fragments of documentation content. The work is devoted to the development of documentation that has several options for its presentation, and its modification. As part of the study, the definition of “multivariant document” was formulated, its formal model and synthesis algorithm in LuaLaTeX were proposed, which became the basis for the developed prototype system for implementing the automated synthesis of multivariant documents in LuaLaTeX. In the framework of the current work, by “multivariant document” we will understand a document that has many options for its presentation, differing from each other in the composition of the fragments that form their content. To achieve the goal of the work, the following were used: graph theory to develop a formal model of a multivariate document, desktop publishing system LuaLaTeX to format documentation content, and the Lua scripting language to implement the possibility of reusing content fragments. The practical significance of the solution obtained in the work is the possibility of generating improved documentation that does not contain redundant information, as well as minimizing the likelihood of errors caused by its modifications. As a demonstration example, the synthesis of a multivariate document is considered using the example of the “Maintenance” section from the passenger car operating manual. Analysis of the results of testing the proposed method demonstrated that the generation of separate operating manuals minimizes the volume of their content and reduces the number of pages in the documentation, which increases the ease of use by the user and minimizes the cost of its production. Thus, for the practical example considered, the content of the documentation was minimized by more than 20 %, which contributed to a reduction in the volume of its publication by 25 %.