Re: Conditional content - what do you do with it?

[Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

Nothing is perfect. I make a lot of use of variables so I can update things automatically.  And when I say duplicate content, I mean immediately adjacent. I figure it's easier to change sentences in two paragraphs right next to each other than to deal with a jumble of condition tags. To each his own.


--- On Wed, 5/12/10, magk -at- mindspring -dot- com <magk -at- mindspring -dot- com> wrote:

From: magk -at- mindspring -dot- com <magk -at- mindspring -dot- com>
Subject: Re: Conditional content - what do you do with it?
To: "Keith Hood" <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com>, techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Wednesday, May 12, 2010, 10:19 AM

#yiv1063719729 {font-family:Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:10pt;font-family:arial, sans-serif;background-color:#ffffff;color:black;}#yiv1063719729 p{margin:0px;}If you duplicate the text, then you have to update it in two separate locations when it changes. (Unless you create a Snippet file in Flare.) One purpose of applying conditional text would be to use single sourcing to create many outputs from one source file.

Good luck,
Gina




-----Original Message-----

From: Keith Hood 

Sent: May 11, 2010 8:55 PM

To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com, magk -at- mindspring -dot- com

Subject: Re: Conditional content - what do you do with it?



I know the problem. I always followed the rule that if I would have to apply more than two conditions to a chunk of content, I duplicated the content and used different condition tags on the duplicate chunk. So if I had to use enough condition tags to produce 6 editions from one file, I'd have 3 content chunks, identical except that each had 2 different conditions applied. Yes it can result in HUGE files, but it made the condition management simple enough to keep from causing the kind of problems you relate. 

>Back in the day, I used conditions in simple ways in FrameMaker. 
>
>More recently, but still several years ago, I used conditional  
>text in RoboHelp, and started getting a little fancy with it.
 
>
>That eventually bit me in the butt, and necessitated a huge 
>amount of work in a short time to fix, to my satisfaction. 
>So I began easing myself out of the use of conditions, 
>even as I was switching from RH to Flare as my HAT. 
>
>Even so, I still had conditions in place, especially in 
>help sets that had not been updated in a while. 
>
>While I found that I could trust conditions to behave as 
>expected in Flare, I still found the other problem that had 
>annoyed me. Both RH (as I recall....) and Flare use colored 
>cross-hatching on text, and colored icons in ToCs and file 
>lists, to show where a given condition is applied. 
>
>When text is given one or two conditions, that's manageable, 
>but when a block of text might have four or more cross-hatchings 
>applied to parts or all, it becomes visual mush.
 








      
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