Re: Conditional content - what do you do with it?

[Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

I know the problem. I always followed the rule that if I would have to apply more than two conditions to a chunk of content, I duplicated the content and used different condition tags on the duplicate chunk. So if I had to use enough condition tags to produce 6 editions from one file, I'd have 3 content chunks, identical except that each had 2 different conditions applied. Yes it can result in HUGE files, but it made the condition management simple enough to keep from causing the kind of problems you relate. 

>Back in the day, I used conditions in simple ways in FrameMaker. 
>
>More recently, but still several years ago, I used conditional  
>text in RoboHelp, and started getting a little fancy with it. 
>
>That eventually bit me in the butt, and necessitated a huge 
>amount of work in a short time to fix, to my satisfaction. 
>So I began easing myself out of the use of conditions, 
>even as I was switching from RH to Flare as my HAT. 
>
>Even so, I still had conditions in place, especially in 
>help sets that had not been updated in a while. 
>
>While I found that I could trust conditions to behave as 
>expected in Flare, I still found the other problem that had 
>annoyed me. Both RH (as I recall....) and Flare use colored 
>cross-hatching on text, and colored icons in ToCs and file 
>lists, to show where a given condition is applied. 
>
>When text is given one or two conditions, that's manageable, 
>but when a block of text might have four or more cross-hatchings 
>applied to parts or all, it becomes visual mush. 



      
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