Question about using Conditional Tags on a variable

[marthab33905574]

I have Framemaker 12. I have a variable and I want to apply a conditional tag to some of the text to show/hide. Can this be done? I'm very new to using Conditional tags. Thanks

[Matt S - Tech Comm Tools]

There's not much beyond text and character tags that you can insert into variables, so you'll probably need to define multiple variables, and then conditionalize the variable itself.

[Lynne A. Price]

Martha,

   You can apply a condition tag to an instance of a variable, but cannot use condition tags within the definition of a variable. As Matt mentioned, you can break the content into multiple variables, but then each time you want to use the entire sequence, you need to remember to insert all the variables and to apply condition tags to some of them.

   An alternative is to avoid variables entirely. If the content you want to repeat is an entire paragraph, you can enter the paragraph once as text, applying condition tags appropriately. For later instances, you can use a cross-reference whose format is <$paratext>. It is more likely that you want to use this content within a paragraph that contains other text as well. You can create a text flow on a reference page and place the repeating content within it. You can then create cross-references to the reference page paragraph within paragraphs on body pages.

   In either case, whenever you change Show/Hide settings for conditional text, update cross-references to see the appropriate conditional text.

--Lynne