Similar documents arise in software and business domains. Examples are user guides for different versions of a software product, contracts between vendors and clients, or legal documents. The usual practice is to capture common document formats and contents in templates that must be manually customized to a new contextoften a slow, tedious, and errorprone process. We propose a method based on a proven approach developed for software reuse that simplifies and automates routine tasks involved in

more »

... reating and updating families of similar documents. Our Document Management Environment (DME) provides functions to create templates capable of higher levels of document contents reuse than templates supported by word processors such as MS Word. DME allows users to designate any arbitrary document part as a template's variation point that can be customized to produce a specific document. DME automates document production by syncing inter-dependent customizations occurring at different variation points. The paper describes two "proof of concept" implementations of DME as Word add-in: The first one uses Content Control mechanism and is specific to MS Word. The second one is based on ART (Adaptive Reuse Technique), a general text manipulation method and tool, and can be used to manage similar documents in any editor that provides an access to the internal representation of documents.