Any way to retain FM’s conditional text tag colours on publication to Responsive HTML5?

[Alexandra Wilowska]

I maintain some user manuals in FM 2019; the deliverables have hitherto been only PDF. I’d like to provide responsive HTML5 output as an alternative. I’ve had reasonable success in my initial general conversion experiments with Publish to Responsive HTML5 but I can’t find any information anywhere about how (or even whether) one can ensure that conditional text in the FM source carries its conditional tag colour (and/or tag background colour) into the HTML output.

For example, if I have a Draft tag coloured green, I would like text tagged as Draft to show in green in the HTML. At present, the Draft-tagged text is included in the HTML output but with the standard colour of the applied FM paragraph style. Thus in the HTML5 the Draft-tagged text is indistinguishable from the rest of the text. Is there any setting that I can use to carry the conditional colour through to HTML5?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Not that I know of - usually you'd only want that sort of tagging if you were producing something for review - and HTML5 is not really a review output format.

[Alexandra Wilowska]

Thanks Jeff; I only used the term 'Draft' as I was trying to think of a simple example for my question. In real-life we have various different tags within the single source for customer variations of a manual. We produce individual customer deliverables for those customers and of course those deliverables do not need to show their own conditionalised text any differently from the general text so that is fine. However, there is one internal deliverable from the same source for our own support team, which, if there are several customer variations of the same parameter value (for example), shows all customer variants in their own colours in the PDF and I was hoping that there might be a way to render the equivalent in the HTML5. However, it sounds as if there is not. 

[Alexandra Wilowska]

It occurred to me overnight that if this requirement were ever a priority (which it isn't), it could be achieved via use of a script, i.e. prior to converting the internal 'master' version with all conditions showing one would run a script to actually apply the equivalent condition colours to the underlying conditionalised material, then publish to HTML5, then run a script to remove the applied colours. Then the HTML would show the colours albeit not derived directly from the condition properties per se.

[frameexpert]

"It occurred to me overnight...it could be achieved via use of a script." I thought I was the only one :-).

[Alexandra Wilowska]

Hi Rick, I'm not quite dreaming in FS or ES yet, but after spending yesterday all focused just on what could be done 'out of the box' my thoughts on the matter opened up as I was drifting off to sleep and crystallised once I woke up. There's definitely something to be said for sleeping on a problem before posting. 🙂

[4everJang]

If you are using structured content, you can control the conditions via an attribute on the source and have that attribute also control the HTML5 styling by adding some lines to the CSS.

[Alexandra Wilowska]

Thank you very much, yes I was vaguely aware that it could probably be done via attribute handling in structured FM but I forgot to say at the outset that I work with unstructured content so unfortunately the structured route isn't an option. But thank you for confirming that my suspicion that structured would have had a way to handle it was correct.

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

Have you considered using Find/Change on the Draft content to apply a character style?

Probably somewhat messy in the long run, but would get it done.

Personally, I'd push for using PDF output for this purpose, since you can publish the PDF with the condition indicators on.

[Alexandra Wilowska]

Thanks Matt, good point, I hadn't thought about that as a technical option. But yes, it probably would be messy overkill. We've published this material exclusively as PDF for the past 20 years or so and will definitely continue to provide the PDF; it works well for the internal support guide with the multiple condition indicators on. I'm not trying to rock the boat re the deliverables, just experimenting with what HTML5 could offer as an additional (rather than replacement) option.

[Alexandra Wilowska · Accepted solution]

Thank you everyone for your suggestions and thoughts. I think if I were to take the HTML5 further I would handle the presentation of the conditional colours in the internal support version via a script to toggle the colours on and off for the conditional text prior to generating the output. But it's not a priority requirement, I was just experimenting with HTML5 as proof of concept.

Many thanks again, your comments were much appreciated.