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> The things I learn on this list!
>
> Did a search for info on using Word for BIG
> conditional text projects like
> manuals for different audiences and not just the
> usual mailmerge letters ...
> didn't find much, but did find some software that
> seems to make it much
> easier. I'm going to try their free trial.
> http://www.livelinx.com/contentmanagement/conditional-text.html
>
I've tried their evaluation version. I downloaded and
tried the evalutation version of this program. It uses
Word's native color highlighting for marking
conditioned text - just blocks of *very* bright color,
no way to use different, lighter colors, no way to
combine text formatting like underlining to denote
different conditions. To people who use colors in
their documents for whatever reason, the color blocks
may make it difficult to tell where conditioning stops
and text that should show as colored text begins.
Also, most of the colors make it VERY difficult to see
the conditioned text.
With this Word program, when you save a file with only
certain conditions showing, the save operation throws
away all conditioned text that is not selected for
viewing. You wind up with 2 files - one that has text
of only the selected condition, and the original file
that still has all the condition-applied text in it.
I also posted this comment on the "Core Dump" web
site, where this program and the Steve Hudson macro
are both mentioned. I remember the Steve Hudson macro
? it was actually out a couple of years ago. I tried
it but never could get it to work right on my machine.
This LiveLinx conditioned text program works amazingly
like that macro. In fact, it works so much like it,
when I first saw it I thought maybe the macro had been
a sort of beta test version for this product -
probably just be an accident of both having to work
with the Word API.
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