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Subject:Re: More on "conditional text" From:Win Day <winday -at- IDIRECT -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 30 Jul 1997 16:15:12 -0400
At 12:09 PM 7/30/97 PDT, Christopher Knight <knight -at- ADA -dot- COM> wrote:
>Hidden text is not the same as conditional text. Conditional text is
>controlled by a variable. In the application I mentioned in my previous
>posting, I defined a variable ForDOS and a variable ForUNIX. Text which
>was for DOS only, I grouped into a field controlled by "IF ForDos".
>Similar for text only for UNIX. Text which was common to both you
>leave alone.
>Hidden text is just ... hidden text. If you wanted to, you could turn on
>the printing of hidden text to accomplish a pale version of conditional
>text, but you could have side effects. For example, in Word index
>entries are hidden, so enabling the printing of hidden text would also
>print the index codes. Also, at most you could have one condition this
>way.
Well, not exactly. In Word you can define paragraph styles or character
styles as hidden text. So I might have 4 versions of a Body text style, one
currently not hidden and the rest hidden, for a given flavour of my manual.
To change flavours, I'd change Body text 1's flag to hidden and Body text
2's flag to not hidden. See?
>True conditional text allows for multiple conditions, and you just change
>the state of the variable(s) to produce the different outputs. BTW Word
>requires that fields be "updated", whereas FrameMaker does this for you.
>Hope this helps.
>
Since I'm doing this using styles and not fields, I don't need to update
anything. Changing the style changes which conditional text prints.
An even easier way to do this in Word would be to have 4 versions of the
template, each one with a different Body text style as not hidden. Then by
switching templates, making sure the styles update as I go, I can change
which text prints and which is hidden.
Ta-da!
Win
----------------------------
Win Day
Technical Writer/Editor mailto:winday -at- idirect -dot- com
=====================================
There's a lot more to gain from his living than wealth.
There's a lesson to learn with devotion:
Be kind to all others, as well as yourself,
Or you'll drift like a boat out on the ocean.
Roving Gypsy Boy (Jimmy Rankin)
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