Formatting rules in EDDs

[Lynne A. Price]

At 08:27 AM 6/21/2007, Adam Schweitzer wrote:
>...We use a tag called "emphasis" to indicate when text should be bold,
>italicized, superscript, etc. and another called "change" to indicate
>when text has changed since the last release of the manual.  In the EDD,
>text formatting rules apply a character format to these elements.
>
>All works well, except when there is an "emphasis" element within a
>"change" element.  In this case, it seems as if the two formatting rules
>conflict, and we lose the emphasis formatting.
>
>We were able to get around this in the past by simply re-applying the
>tag (ie. highlight the emphasis or change, select the same from the
>element catalog and choose "change"), which would apply the proper
>formatting.  This is no longer possible, as we're now using conditional
>text, and each time we change what is shown in the document, the
>formatting reverts, and we again lose the emphasis formatting.

Adam,
   How are the two character formats defined? If they both set explicit 
values only for the relevant properties and specify "as is" for the 
remaining properties, then, yes, any text that is within both emphasis and 
change elements should have the amalgamation of properties of both 
character formats. For example, if change turns on change bars and sets all 
other properties to "as is", and emphasis turns on bold and sets all other 
properties to "as is", the contents of a change element within an emphasis 
element, and of an emphasis element within a change element should be bold 
with a change bar. Of course, only a single character tag can apply, and it 
is the tag of the innermost element that will be applied.
   Having said that, I just created a quick test file to confirm the claims 
I just made. I found no problems with the change element within the 
emphasis element. When I created an emphasis element within a change 
element, however, I seem to have encountered a bug. The format is initially 
correct. When I insert more content preceding the outer element, the 
formatting stays correct until the outer element wraps onto the next line. 
At this point, the emphasized phrase loses its boldness. This is not a 
display issue, because Ctrl-L does not restore the formatting. However, 
reformatting the entire document (by importing element definitions from the 
current file, checking the box to remove formatting overrides) does make 
the element bold again. So does reformatting the element or any of its 
ancestors by changing the element or ancestor to itself, i.e., changing the 
emphasis element to emphasis, the change element to change, or the 
containing paragraph to paragraph. (For readers who think this approach is 
not intuitive, it parallels restoring a paragraph format that may have been 
overridden by applying the paragraph format from the paragraph catalog.)

         --Lynne

Lynne A. Price
Text Structure Consulting, Inc.
Specializing in structured FrameMaker consulting, application development, 
and training
lprice at txstruct.com            http://www.txstruct.com
voice/fax: (510) 583-1505      cell phone: (510) 421-2284