NC-FUN SIG Talks About Conditional Text

At the Feb 22, 2005, NC FrameMaker Users Network Special Interest Group (NC-FUN SIG), Terry Smith presented on conditional text in Adobe FrameMaker. If you’re a FrameMaker user who was unable to attend the meeting, be sure to read Terry’s helpful hints that are listed below:

• If you make a sentence conditional, select the ending punctuation, but don’t select the spaces on either side of the sentence.
• Make complete sentences conditional if your document will be translated.
• If you make a word conditional, don’t select the spaces around it.
• Use colors and text styles to indicate conditions. It’s easy to turn off the colors.
• Don’t use magenta as one of your condition colors because Frame uses magenta if the text has more than one condition.

She also shared a few tips from her own experience. She recommends using identical condition definitions and settings across your entire book. She also recommends creating a print condition for book-size artwork and an online condition for a screen-size GIF.

Even if you have been using FrameMaker for a while, there are always things that you don’t know that you wish you did. Terry shared a few of those things with us. Most memorable is that you can copy and paste conditional text settings. Just use Edit > Copy Special > Conditional Text Settings. Also, another memorable tip may be that if you import a document into another document, the condition indicators (colors) and show/hide settings from the master document are used.

And, finally, oftentimes, we are faced with trouble in Frame-world. Terry addressed several troublespots that were relevant:

• If you have unresolved cross references, find all crossreference markers and make them unconditional.
• If conditional text color isn’t showing up, select the Show Condition Indicators checkbox in the Show/Hide Conditional Text window.
• If you’re trying to make a table column conditional, stop trying. You can’t. That’s right, you can’t. You can make the text inside a cell conditional or you can make an entire row conditional.

Terry’s slides from this presentation can be downloaded at http://www.stc-carolina.org/02-22-2005+Conditional+Text. Be sure to join this group for an upcoming meeting. Details will be announced on the web site and chapter announcement listserv.