Color Views Common Conventions?

Report · Apr 13, 2011

Arnis Gubins: ... so that the "Invisible Text" is seen in (say) View 6 and set to "Invisible" in View 1 ...

It appears that CV (Color Views) does indeed work for three main elements we need to twiddle in every document:

authoring-only information (Invisible for all publication modes)
masking graphical elements (Cutout for all publication modes)
web nav (Invisible only for print publication)

So the question arises, what standardized Views to use. If a random CV-aware Frameuser took over these documents, what "best practices" might they expect to see?

My inclination is to use:

Web publication
Print publication
<reserved for future use>
<reserved for future use>
<reserved for future use>
Authoring/draft mode

What say ye?

Report · Apr 07, 2015

@Error 7103,

Did you get any follow-up on this, maybe offline?

I like the idea of another way to support single-sourcing without having to use conditions for everything.

Best,

Report · Apr 07, 2015

Just keep in mind that toggling something to invisible leaves the original space, whereas using a Condition forces FM to reflow the content over the space that the hidden conditional content occupied. This could have a substantial impact on the visual appearance of your documents depending upon the output route required.

Report · Apr 07, 2015

@Arnis Gubins,

Thanks! That one fact might sway my decision.

Report · Apr 08, 2015

re: Just keep in mind that toggling something to invisible leaves the original space, whereas using a Condition forces FM to reflow the content

Concur, and that was the rule I developed after mooting this CV list.

Use Color Views for "conditional" content where reflow is not required or not desired.

Use Condition Codes for conditional content where reflow is required/desired, or you ran out of CVs.

We also ended up using CV 5 for "Review" edition, showing the rough/draft/review/proof/final indicator and some other stewardship content like timestamp.

Report · Nov 23, 2022

7 years later, and I'm still using CVs for edition presentation control, using this convention:
1. PDF ebook (paged)
2. print edition (.ps or press-ready PDF)
3. XML/HTML (unpaged)
4. other eBook (unpaged)
5. Review
6. Authoring mode (all special colors Normal)

CV is a legacy feature, still present in FM, that is unknown to many users. It's not had any enhancement attention, and could use some, as:
a. there are only 6 states, and
b. they are just numbered states, and can't be assigned names
So documenting them in the project's 00_template.fm file is key (another personal convention, and that file provides a source to bulk-import/apply Color Settings to the whole project).

A recent book used CV to control visibility of elements for author-only metas, header/footer on (paged), header/footer nav links, hypertext/URLs generally, pub date, draft timestamp, content defined by Variables.

And for some thread clarity, my forum username pre-2015 was "Error7103".

Report · Nov 24, 2022

Yes, you expalined it very well for CV. Can it also be worked for posting images cut outs on the website elementor?