Typing conditional text

[Fred Ridder]

FrameMaker 8.0p277, Windows XP SP3.

 

Am I correct that FrameMaker's behavior when you type an Enter in conditionalized text changed before version 8.0? The behavior I'm seeing in FM8.0 seems flat-out wrong to me, and is driving me crazy.  

I older versions of FrameMaker (at least through 7.0, which is the other version I have on my system), if you type Enter with the insertion point at the very end of a paragraph that is conditionalized, you get a conditionalized pilcrow in the existing paragraph and the new paragraph is unconditional. This was a little annoying if you wanted the next paragraph to also be conditional, but there was an easy workaround, which was to always keep a space between the insertion point and the end of the paragraph. That way, the new paragraph would be non-empty, and FrameMaker would apply the condition to it. Perfectly logical, and everything just worked.

 

But in FrameMaker 8.0, if you type Enter in a paragraph that is entirely conditionalized, the *new* pilcrow (the one that is inserted at the end of the conditional paragraph you've been typing is always *unconditional* and the *following* pilcrow is always *conditional*. This is just plain wrong, because the unconditional pilcrow on the otherwise conditional paragraph will always produce an extra line space when you hide the condition. And if the following paragraph is actually non-conditional, having a conditional pilcrow at its end will make it collapse into the paragraph that follows it when the condition is hidden. 

 

I find myself having to spend a lot of time manually conditionalize and unconditionalizing pilcrows throughout the documents I work on. And it's only made worse by the fact that the developers who write the initial drafts of the docs and apply the conditions usually don't even see the pilcrows because the won't follow my advice to always work with View Text Symbols turned on.

 

Am I the only person who has noticed this? I wasted about a half hour trying to find anything about this misbehavior in the Adobe Knowledgebase. Does anyone have a workaround? Does FrameMaker 9 behave the same way (not that I'd be able to recommend having to spend money to upgrade the dozen or so developers to the new version...)?

 

Fred Ridder