Looking for a technique for applying conditionals

[rebecca officer]

I'd like to echo what Richard said about not conditioning individual
words, from painful experience. We started off with quite a lot of
part-sentences conditioned and have been gradually removing them,
because they're so much harder to edit.

Another possible approach, especially if you have this phrase multiple
times, is to use a variable. For UNIX define it as "a .tar file", for
Windoze, as "a .zip file", and for both, as "a .tar file (UNIX) or a
.zip file (Windows)".

Cheers, Rebecca

>>> John Posada <jposada01 at yahoo.com> 19/07/06 08:49 >>>
Hi, guys...I'm reworking our boilerplate to allow a more accurate
application of our conditional settings from the perspective of
operating systems.

Our applications support anywhere from one to four operatings systems
(Window, Solaris, Linux, and HP-UX). Sometimes we are specific
between the four and sometimes we group the last three under the
catch-all of UNIX. (sorry, open sourcers...this aint gonna change)

My issue: I have some instances where they are listed in a bullet
list, which makes it easy to apply the conditionals as I need them.
However, some instances use OS specific references in a sentence.
Following is an example of one.

-------------
    This utility collects version information and saves
    the /conf, /local, /rules, and /setup directories to 
    a .tar file (UNIX) or a .zip file (Windows).
-------------

I'm looking for a way to apply conditionals so that when applied, the
sentence becomes:

-------------
   This utility collects version information and saves
   the /conf, /local, /rules, and /setup directories to 
   a .tar file (UNIX).

and 

   This utility collects version information and saves
   the /conf, /local, /rules, and /setup directories to 
   a .zip file (Windows).
---------------

The tricky part is the word "or". When both OSs are used, the 'or"
has its place. However, when either OS is used to the exclusion of
the other, the "or" should be removed.

Short of rewriting the paragraph, has anyone worked out how to deal
with this situation?


John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never
actually known what the question is."
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