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navoff1
Participating Frequently
June 23, 2014
Answered

How to build a document with conditional text

  • June 23, 2014
  • 1 reply
  • 1380 views

So, I created a condition for a feature that is new to my document and until it's stable, I want to hide that text. No problem. I selected the condition and from the Show/Hide Conditional Text pod, I moved it over to hide. When I created the conditional text, I gave it a background color of gray so I could easily distinguish the conditional text from the non-conditional text. However, if I leave the conditional text visible and go to generate a PDF, the gray background style appears on the conditional text in the PDF. Is there something I'm missing here when it comes to building a PDF? I don't want the style I see in the FM file to appear in the final PDF. I only want that background color as an indicator while I'm editing it. I don't want to have to remember to change the style every time I want to build with the condition visible. Here's a screenshot from the PDF. The bits in gray are what I had applied the condition to.

After selecting the book file, I tried both doing a Save as PDF and a Print Book but both options ended up with my conditional text having the gray background style in the final output.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Bob_Niland

> If you haven’t set the Show/Hide settings to hide it, ...

Specifically:
[_] Show Condition Indicators

An alternative route is to use a named indicator color (say, Pending) that is controlled by Color Views. If you switch to a Color View in which color Pending is in the Cutout or Invisible pane, it won't show even if the Condition and Indicators are set to Show.

Since the purpose of FM's Color Views isn't terribly obvious:

  • Use Conditions where text re-flow is required when the tagged content is switched on/off.
  • Use Color Views where text re-flow is not required when the tagged content is switched on/off.

1 reply

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 23, 2014

If you haven’t set the Show/Hide settings to hide it, why would you expect to not see it in your PDF? Try hiding it before printing to PDF – is it gone then?

N
navoff1Author
Participating Frequently
June 23, 2014

No, you have misunderstood the problem. Yes, If I want to hide the condition so it doesn't print, that works great. But, once the feature is active (or say I have two customers, one that has the feature and one that doesn't), If I want to print the document with the conditional text visible, then I want the text but I don't want the background style that shows up in FM. The conditional style should only appear in FM, not the generated PDF.

I worked for years with Madcap's Flare and you could set the color of the conditional text in order to distinguish what text was conditioned and with what condition (different colors for different conditions). However, when you generated the output, those colors never showed up. The only thing that displayed was the text that was set to be visible. That's what I was expecting from FM. And the FM tutorials I have taken, that's what they stated should happen. Here's a transcript from the FrameMaker 10 tutorial on Lynda.com:

When we go down to the Conditional Text pod, you'll notice that we have a number of radio buttons for In, Not In, As Is, and then we also have our tags down below. So this is going to be in the US version. So we'll click the US tag. We'll change the radio button to In. You'll see the status change over here to In, and then we'll apply that by clicking the first button in our group of buttons here to apply it. Now, you'll see something change here in the document and if we deselect our text, you can see it's now blue with the overline and that's how we decided the style and color would appear for our US tags. That's not how it's going to print. It's just for our own visual purposes.

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