a mystery of too many migrations?

[walter hudson]

Dear Framers:

The following is excerpted from the QA Managers account of a really bizarre situation and if anyone has experienced anything similar I would GREATLY appreciate a response. 
I am going to their site next week to inspect the damage and consult on how/if it is possible to salvage a FM version of their docs (which sadly they punted on and reverted to Word!). 

Two big questions: 
1.  In which version of FM (7 to 8 to 9) the processing of conditional text/tags was modified (my bestguess of the culprit)
2.  Anything in the PDF processing that could hide/block text added in an earlier version of FM???

However, the good news is that the QA Mgr wants to get back to a "reliable" version of FM and I want to solve this mystery--Just 2 Weird!

Walter Hudson

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We were originally on FM 8.1 when the fun began with the newly hired Tech Doc writer contractor began. Early in the project, the laptop used by the original Tech Doc author who created the original FM 8.1 product docs developed a problem with the touchpad.  The new contractor requested another computer and was given a second laptop with FM 8.1 installed.  He took it home and ran into a license problem when trying to use the newly installed FM 8.1.  He then installed a version of FM 9.x (not sure which sub-version).  He then proceeded to migrate the FM 8.1 generated files to the new FM 9.x computer and go through whatever conversion process that is needed to make them work in the FM 9.x environment. And from there, approximately 13 doc review/update cycles were done before I decided to end my pain and discharge the contractor. What we discovered during these reviews was that edits we had put it during this migration cycle appeared in the Frame files but
 somehow did not appear in the PDFs and nothing the Tech Writer or any of us could do could explain this.