Exploiting patterns and templates for technical documentation

There are several domains in which the documents are made of reusable pieces. Template languages have been widely studied by the document engineering community to deal with common structures and textual fragments. Though, templating mechanisms are often hidden in mainstream word-precessors and even unknown by common users. This paper presents a pattern-based language for templates, serialized in HTML and exploited in a user-friendly WYSIWYG editor for writing technical documentation. We discuss the deployment of the editor by an engineering company in the railway domain, as well as some generalized lessons learned about templates.