Conditional text in index markers

[Fred Ridder]

Tom De Rouck asked:

> In Framemaker 8.0p277, does anyone know if it is possible to apply
> conditional text to a part of the text in an index marker?
> I want some of the text only to display in my online help version, so I
> have a condition "PDF" and one "online-only".


No, it is not possible to apply a condition tag within a variable's value. You can only apply conditions once the content appears in the document flow. For what you want to do, there are two approaches you could take, one of which requires a slightly more complicated process when preparing to publish to a given medium and the other of which requires more work up-front and probably will be harder to maintain on an ongoing basis.

The first approach would be to use one variable name, but to redefine its value for the appropriate medium as you prepare to publish by importing variable values from a speical template file. I have used this approach many times and it works well. And it only adds one step to the preparation for publishing.

The second approach would be to define two different variable names with the different medium-specific content, and to insert both variables tagged with the appropriate text conditions instead of inserting just the single variable name. The advantage of this is that you would only have to worry about setting up the proper conditional text show/hide rules at publishing time, but the downside is that you must take some steps to ensure that the conditionalized pair of variables always get inserted together and that neither of them ever gets deleted independent of the other. 

-Fred Ridder