Conditonal Text Nightmare :) Need Help

[jmootrey]

Hello Everyone,

  This is my first post and it has been authored due to hours of fruitless struggle with conditional text.  I am by no means a framemaker expert but I am doing my best to learn. What I would like to accomplish is the following. I have a document that exists in 2 books, install.book or care.book. The document (doc.fm) needs to be worded slightly different between the two books. I have set the wording to use conditional text and seem to have it working correctly as long as I manually set the show or hide options. What I would like to do is have the book know what type of text should be shown or hidden during the print process. If I understand correctly this is exactly what conditional text is for.  I currently have a sentance that should be hidden or shown depending on the book it is attached too.. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Am I even going about this the right way?

[Van Kurtz]

You are going about it in the right way, but to my knowledge, there is no way for the book to know which conditions to set. I assume you have two book files, each containing the common document. When you are ready to print, open one book, set the appropriate show/hide setting for that book, and print it. Then open the second book file, set the show/hide settings to THAT book, and print it. As far as I know, you cannot get the book to do that for you automatically.

[jmootrey]

Thanks Van, I was afraid of that. Would be a nice feature though

.

[Art Campbell]

I'd use a slightly different approach... that, for me, is simpler.

Set up your main content file with your two conditional text settings.

In each book, create a new, empty container file from your chapter template. It should have the correct headers/footers, tags, variables and so on for each book.

Import the main file into each container, specifying to use the container's settings. That will impose the correct variables, tags, and conditional text settings.

That's it. The single file is read into each container file and set up using each book's settings. You may need to update the book before printing / PDFing in order to ensure that everything is in place, but in the end I think this is less work than juggling settings at the book level.

***

A flavor of this is to "home" the content file in one book and use the container strategy in the second.

Cheers,

Art

[jmootrey]

Art:

   Brilliant!!!! Thank you, that sounds like a great solution. I'll attempt it and post my results.

[Arnis Gubins]

You can also just use the .book file, select all of the files in the book and then from the View menu select the "Show/Hide Conditional Text" option to apply the appropriate condition to *all* files in the book.

Note: for files common to multiple books, the condition(s) in the common files will be reset to the current book, so do this just before creating output.