Conditional Text for Reuse

[Chris310351564c3p]

I am attempting to use Conditional Text in multiple documents that contain the same linked InCopy story, but the Conditional Text is malformed when I check out/check in the story. Is there a way to leverage Conditional Text and synchronize it across different documents that are not part of a book.

For example, I have four different models all of which come standard with various options. Some of the models come with additional option and some with fewer. I would like to use conditional text to update the "source" InCopy story for these features so I can update in a single document then update the link in subsequent documents.

The issue I've run into is that these Conditional Text values seem to shift of their own accord when the InCopy story is modified in one document then updated in another. I come from the DITA world where conditions were easily used for content reuse - is there any way to tweak InDesign's Conditional Text to function in a similar way?

[Steve Werner]

As far as I know, an InCopy workflow doesn't support Conditional Text, but someone may correct me. Like a lot of specialized features, you might need to do scripting to do what InDesign doesn't have built in.

[Chris310351564c3p]

Thank you for your reply, Steve. Beyond scripting (I am not well versed in scripting nor could I effectively write the scripts needed for this complexity), is there an InDesign or InCopy workflow that supports the behavior I am trying to use?

[BobLevine]

If you change the conditions in one document it's going to change in all of the linked documents. That is expected behavior so unless I'm missing something from your description of the workflow, I'm not sure what the "solution" is.

Can you be more specific about what exactly you're trying to do here because if having different conditions set for different documents is the goal, I don't see how that's going to work.

[Chris310351564c3p]

This is how I intend to use the conditions. All four documents contain the same four conditions. When I edit the InCopy story and check it in then update it in a different document, the conditions become malformed. In other words, the conditions are now applied to items to which they were not applied in the edited story. Items that were previously unconditional now have incorrect conditions applied.

[BobLevine]

What does malformed mean? Say you change unconditional in one document to condition three and then update the story. What happens to the other three documents? They should change to condition three as well with the unchanged conditional text fields unaffected.

[Chris310351564c3p]

This is the issue - I change nothing related to content that is unconditional then update the InCopy story in a different document and the unconditional text is now conditioned.

[BobLevine]

Can you post some screenshots, please?

[Chris310351564c3p]

Yes, please tell me what you would like included in the screenshots.

[BobLevine]

First show the original document with the changes and then one of the other documents before and after updating the link.

[Chris310351564c3p]

I will have to replicate this issue with non-proprietary information. Are you having difficulty understanding the issue I am experiencing or do you expect user error in the implementation of Conditional Text?

[BobLevine · Accepted solution]

I'm at 50/50 right now on this. I've been using (and teaching) InCopy for the better part of 20 years but using it for something like this is a new one for me. So before I tell you to report it as a bug, I'd like to see it in action. Something else you might want to try is turning on track changes to see if anything jumps out at you.

[Chris352903459ipo]

Bob - I have tested this several more times with varying degrees of failure (conditional text being applied to content that was unconditional). I have searched Adobe resources to determine if Conditional Text use in linked InCopy stories is an unsupported workflow, but I cannot find anything official.

[Luke Jennings3]

I'm not sure this would work with conditional text, but a work-around might be to place a cropped page from the source InDesign file into the other files (for the text), when the source document is changed, the link will be updated in the other versions. The conditional text could be on separate InDesign layers and object layer options used for the various versions. It's not an ideal workflow, as you won't be able to edit the linked copy on the other versions.

[Chris310351564c3p]

Thank you for your response, Luke. This sounds like a creative approach, but at that point maintaining the four lists may be a more desirable solution. I'm honestly surprised InDesign does not contain functionality similar to DITA's in this regard with how prevalent content reuse is.

[Chris352903459ipo]

I would like to reopen this thread. This user submitted the same issue I am experiencing as a bug in 2020 and it looks like it was not touched. I have been using this workaround, but it is a miserable way to use conditional text. 

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/41258617-incopy-with-co...