Tracked Changes in HTML Output
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Our department has to output several large policy manuals (5k to 10k pages) each month for an internal audience of several thousand users. One of our requirements is that each month's changes should be visible to the users. So deleted text is shown as strike through and new text is colored. Whether it's optimal or advisable is irrelevant—suffice it to say that changing the requirement is an impossibility.
We'd like to use tracked changes to satisfy the requirement, but these manuals are published and then archived on an internal website that includes 10+ years of materials. We publish using Frame 2017's Responsive HTML option, and it doesn't seem to want to show the markup. It will show the deleted and added text, but no color or strike through. We've been forced to use character tagging to indicate changes, but, as you can imagine, with 5k to 10k page manuals and sometimes thousands of changes per month, it's incredibly inefficient and inconvenient to first make and tag the changes, but even more so to remove the tagging. Our method, which is the only one we've been able to come up, is to select the text through to its paragraph marker, click Default Format, and then reapply the Paragraph tag. If there is a single word tagged within a sentence, the format will change with Default font, but not if the whole paragraph is selected. In addition, we can't simply select the entire text flow/file contents and use Default Font, because all of the selected text will pick up the tagging of the first paragraph in the file/flow. That means going line by line unless paragraphs happen to have the same tag.
Is there a way, even if it involves using extendscript or some deep, technical solution, to publish to HTML and preserve the formatting of tracked changes? If not, is there some way to make character tagging more efficient? In particular, is there a way to remove character tags more efficiently? Any help or thoughts would be appreciated.
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What are the tags used to indicate inserted or deleted content?
Are you mapping these to character tags in your CSS (in the Publish pod settings)?
-Matt
FrameMaker Course Creator, Author, Trainer, Consultant
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The existing character tags work fine in the HTML output. It is tracked changes (the built in feature) that won't show. As far as I can tell, there are no associated or at least obvious tags associated with the feature. I'm not clear on why it shows up in the PDF but not the HTML. Is there possibly some "hidden" tagging involved?
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The Track Changes tags are unique, so you might try swapping out these tags for "normal" conditional tags that exist within your doc before conversion.
-Matt
FrameMaker Course Creator, Author, Trainer, Consultant
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It appears that the condition indicators don't show up in HTML regardless or which tag is used. They will show up in the PDF as expected. There don't seem to be any applicable settings in the default HTML setup UI.
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I would expect that - who's looking for Track Changes to appear in the HTML pages? In a PDF, sure - somebody would be using them to review the planned changes; but HTML? That's more of a final output format IMHO - I'd suggest firing up the Tracker and log a wishlist with Adobe.

