How to Hide a Chapter or .FM File in a book with conditional tags?

[airam_22]

I have several questions re: Conditional Tags because I can't find any tips or instructions regarding these:

1. Is there a way to hide a chapter or .fm file in a book with conditional tags? Would conditional expressions work for this? What conditional expression should I use? For example, a guide has 5 chapters and I'd like to create a version of the guide without chapters 2 and 4 (let's call this User Version, and another version with all of the chapters (let's call this Admin Version). How do I execute that in Framemaker using conditional tags or build?
2. Can I also use the conditional tag to simultaneously publish 2 versions of the guide as PDF documents?
3. Lastly, is it an expected behavior that when conditional tags are applied on bulleted items and I hide other tags, the tagged text are hidden but its corresponding bullet point is still displayed as shown like this:

• Vegetables
•  
• Legumes

Thanks in advance.

[frameexpert]

I will answer the second question first. Make sure that you select the whole paragraph, including the paragraph symbol, when you apply the condition to the paragraph. The easiest way is to triple-click on the paragraph to ensure that the entire paragraph is selected.

With books, you have two approaches: First, you can right-click on a book component and choose Exclude. I haven't tested this, but it should exclude the component from printing to PDF. However, a better approach in my opinion is simply to have two books. Books are simply pointers to the components that they contain so your UserVersion.book file (for example) would not contain chapters 2 and 4. I prefer the multi-book method because it explicitly shows me how many versions of the publication that I have.

Keep in mind that you may have to Update each book before making the PDF to ensure that numbering, TOCs, etc. are correct, but you would have to do that with the Exclude method anyway.

[Bob_Niland]

frameexpert: … you can right-click on a book component and choose Exclude. I haven't tested this, but it should exclude the component from printing to PDF.

It also excludes it from page numbering on Update Book. Exclude works. I tested in on a current project where one potential publisher required padding pages for impostion, and another didn't. I could switch the padding pages component file on and off via Exclude.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

For question #3, Rick's answer to #2 applies - be sure you're including the paragraph tag in your conditioning - easiest way to check is to have Text Symbols turned on so you can see all the indicators.