When Author-it Software Corporation (ASC) released Author-it 5.0 at the end of September, it also released Author-it Xtend, patent-pending technology that is a first in the Help authoring world.

Author-it Xtend lets you make conscious, intelligent re-use decisions based on your existing content. You get to choose how often or how quickly you want to be notified of matching content, with settings including:

• Minimum number of words typed before suggesting: Choose the number of words that AIT users must type before Xtend prompts with suggestions.
• Maximum number of suggestions: Choose the total number of suggestions that you want to see.
• Percentage matching: Choose what the match percentage must be before suggestions are displayed.

What's really cool is the customizable highlighting feature of Xtend. When your library has been analyzed, you can enable highlighting and immediately tell how a paragraph has been used before: 100% (exact match), or any range you specify.

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For example, here is a screenshot from one of my topics:

The orange highlighted paragraph indicates 95-99% reuse with another paragraph somewhere in my library. The cranberry highlighted paragraph is a re-used paragraph.

By opening Xtend, I can see that the difference in the orange highlighted paragraph is the use of "However, ". Once I remove "However, " from this paragraph (or add it to the other), I'll have 100% re-use with this paragraph.

While I'm typing, Xtend will display a window that shows other paragraphs using the same words.

This feature will help reduce translation costs, and also make it easier to provide consistently-worded documentation, thus providing a major benefit to teams using Author-it.