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

Subject: Re: Conditional content - what do you do with it?
From: Keith Hood <klhra -at- yahoo -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com, magk -at- mindspring -dot- com
Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 17:55:38 -0700 (PDT)

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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References:
Conditional content - what do you do with it?: From: magk

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