Strategy for Handling Conditional Text

[William Abernathy]

Joseph:

What you are describing is exactly the sort of situation conditional text was 
designed for. From the sound of things, you're bothered by the basic logic of 
conditional text. You are not the first writer to experience this, and you will 
not be the last. Nonetheless, I have a hard time imagining how adding another 
layer of complexity is going to help you over that hump. My advice, good for 
what you paid for it, is to put your chin into the breeze and perfect your 
conditional text technique. With time, you will master it, and it will become 
less confusing.

Concerning the specific issue you address, one way of dealing with the paragraph 
mark issue is simply to get into the habit of adding a space to the end of every 
line. Once upon a time, when memory was expensive, and mighty lizards ruled the 
land, leaving an extra byte of padding at the end of a line was a pretty 
profligate use of memory. Time to get over this. Adding an extra space character 
makes not picking up the paragraph tag much easier. As for tracking, you need to 
force your reviewers into reviewing a Windows draft and a Linux draft. I've 
managed this with change bars only, and in newer versions of Frame, your 
tracking only gets better.

Good luck,

--William

Joseph Lorenzini wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have recently encountered a documentation issue that I'd like feedback on.
> I am documenting a software product. There are two versions of the product.
> One version is for Windows. The other version is for Linux. The windows
> version came after the Linux version and there are significant UI and
> functional differences between the two. Originally, I was told that these
> differences would eventually go away and that the user experience would be
> identical on both operating systems. This hasn't happened. The differences
> have grown.
>
> This is problematic because a Linux user isn't going to care about
> windows-only functionality and a windows user isn't going to care about
> Linux-only functionality. At the same time, there are major similarities
> between the two versions because they are the same software. It doesn't make
> sense to create two different documents, which share a large amount of
> information. This has led me finally to consider conditional text. I'd
> create two tags: windows and linux. Then,  I'll apply the tags to operating
> system specific UI/functionality while leaving shared content alone.
>
> Here's the thing though, I am not a fan of conditional text. I've learned
> that i need to apply the tags in a very specific sequence and apply it to
> preceding paragraph marks or otherwise hiding and showing the conditional
> text introduces funky formatting into my book. I also think it makes
> managing and tracking content in a document really tricky. So here are my
> questions:
>
> -is there a better mechanism than conditional text that I could use to get
> the same result?
> -If conditional text is the best solution, is there a framemaker plugin that
> makes managing conditional text easier? Note that I am not interested in
> FrameScript.
>
> Sincerely,
> Joseph Lorenzini


-- 
William Abernathy
Berkeley, CA
http://yourwritereditor.com