Conditional text for single-sourcing

[Nancy Allison]

This is a lengthy, nitty-gritty explanation of one oddity I'm encountering as I rework a manual in Framemaker for conversion to a .chm file. So, if you like nitty-gritty stuff, read on. If you find such discussions unbearably tedious . . . you might want to read something else!

Because I started with an existing manual, I couldn't create clean standards that would make conversion easy.

Example: the manual has introductory sentences like "Figure 3.12 shows a waveform generated by an Open test." It is followed by an anchored frame containing the figure, and then a caption with autonumbering that says "Figure 3.12. Open Test Waveform"

In the online help system, this topic can be reached from any direction; as a result, chapter and figure numbers have no meaning. Therefore, I mask them using conditional text.

Translation standards say that it is best to create an entire, alternative sentence, rather than creating conditional phrases. That's because the grammatical structures of other languages may not accommodate the alternatives that make sense in English.

Therefore, I apply my PDF condition tag to "Figure 3.12 shows a waveform generated by an Open test." and to the entire caption.

I create this sentence: "The following figure shows a waveform generated by an Open test." and apply my Online Help condition tag to it.

The PDF has the original sentence, the figure, and the caption.

The Online Help has the new introductory sentence, the figure, and no caption.

OK, well and good.

However, when I try to apply the same process to Table titles, I can rewrite the introductory sentence just fine and apply conditional tags to the two versions. 

But, the table title autonumber is built into the Table Title somehow. If I select the Table Title and apply the "PDF" condition tag to it, and display only the "Online Help" conditional text, I still get the autonumber in the Table Title. The actual title text is gone, but the autonumber remains. It seems to be hard-wired into the table itself.

It appears that my only recourse is to set my table formats to No Title in the Table Designer, and then insert a free-standing autonumbered Table Title paragraph, which can be completely masked with conditional text.

This means redoing a lot of tables (in a 400+ page document), and in the template I am creating, and I am not looking forward to it.

Have you encountered this problem (the non-disappearing table autonumber)? Do you have any other technique for doing this?

Thanks for reading all this.