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Participant
April 5, 2023
Answered

Setting change bars via a condition in a document containing conditionalised table rows (FM2019)

  • April 5, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 325 views

Hello. I use FM2019 to maintain books comprising documents which contain several different conditions for customer-specific output variants. My deliverables are PDF.

These documents include tables. Within a table it is common for one or more specific rows to be entirely conditionalized (at table row level, not cell content level) for one or more customers. When Show Condition Indicators is checked, conditionalized table row cell borders are cross-hatched, as expected.

Prior to PDF creation I set the appropriate Show/Hide Condition Text settings to show only the material for the appropriate customer, and uncheck the Show Condition Indicators box. For tables,  the cross-hatching is now hidden.

To indicate document content changes in the PDF, I have previously applied change bars manually (Format->Style->Change Bar) and then post-publication I’ve cleared them all en masse, starting the next iteration of the document with a clean slate. However, for various reasons I am now considering applying them via a condition instead (there are potential use cases for using find/change to locate and then clear certain change bars selectively while retaining others).

From my experimentation so far, the stumbling point comes with conditionalized table rows.

If I create a condition tag with Style set to Change Bar then the change bar itself is a condition indicator. So I do not expect it to show if the Show Condition Indicators box is unchecked. But the Show Condition Indicators box has to be unchecked to prevent cross-hatching showing in the conditionalized table cell borders.

Does this mean that it is impossible to use a condition to manage change bars (that must be visible in the output) in a document which also contains conditionalized table rows (whose cross-hatching must not be visible in the output)?

(Caveat – there were some odd things going on with viewing, saving and closing – initially it looked, counterintuitively, as if unchecking Show Condition Indicators and then selecting Apply would retain the change bar in the view while hiding the cross-hatching, but this was just in that initial view. If the document is then saved and reopened (with Show Condition Indicators still unchecked), the change bars do not show (as one would expect)).

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Correct answer Winfried Reng

Hi,

 

Do you mean that you want to show the condition indicator of one condition and hide the condition indicator of another condition? No. That's not possible.

 

What about text edits? You can show hide text edits while condition indicators are shown or hidden. (Sometimes there are inconsistencies, but generally this works.)

 

Best regards

 

Winfried

1 reply

Winfried RengCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
April 5, 2023

Hi,

 

Do you mean that you want to show the condition indicator of one condition and hide the condition indicator of another condition? No. That's not possible.

 

What about text edits? You can show hide text edits while condition indicators are shown or hidden. (Sometimes there are inconsistencies, but generally this works.)

 

Best regards

 

Winfried

awilowskaAuthor
Participant
April 5, 2023

Many thanks for confirming what I expected, Winfried. Essentially yes, I was trying to use condition indicators in a contradictory way, but only after I was given false hope (see my original ‘Caveat’) when, despite Show Condition Indicators being unchecked, the initial view (prior to saving) still showed change bars (but not the other condition indicators).

 

Prior to the introduction (some years ago) of the current cross-hatching behaviour in FM I could get away with just changing the customer condition styles from their individual colours to As Is before saving the document with Show Condition Indicators left checked. Nowadays that would still work for text but would not hide the cross-hatching in tables, which persists unless Show Condition Indicators is unchecked. Given that I already knew that Show Condition Indicators has to be unchecked in these documents, I should not have expected to be able to apply change bars via a condition when the goal is for change bars to remain visible in the final deliverable.

 

(I have never used text edits but on quickly looking it seems to me that tracking text edits is more useful for pre-publication review rather than as a visual indication to end readers of the final publication.)

 

Kind regards, 

Alex

awilowskaAuthor
Participant
April 6, 2023

(Follow-on: after sleeping on the matter I think that I will work with a combination of manually-applied change bars alongside a change bar condition set with Style As Is, not Change Bar. So, for each change, I will apply both the condition and the manual change bar. Makes the maintenance a bit more fiddly, but I will then have the searchability via the condition tag plus the visibility of the change bar, which will satisfy my use cases.)