Strategy for Handling Conditional Text

[Combs, Richard]

Joseph Lorenzini wrote:

> Thank you for your feedback. I'll definitely go with the conditional text
> then. I like guidelines of only conditionalizing paragraphs is and never
> have overlapping conditions.  As Richard suggested, if I have to I'll just
> replicate the paragraph. As for the funky formatting I was referring to,
> the issue is this: sometimes the end paragraph mark may be an indented
> item, part of a bulleted list, or a section heading.  So it isn't always
> the case that I'll have the same formatting every where in the book. As a
> result, when I did a hide/show in some cases, the resulting paragraph mark
> would inherit a number or formatting from a header. As a workaround, I may
> introduce empty "Body" paragraph marks to ensure that only body paragraphs
> are rendered no matter what I show or hide.

Sorry, I don't understand. When you hide a condition, there is no "resulting paragraph mark" -- there is only all the stuff that _doesn't_ have that condition applied. And that stuff doesn't "inherit" anything from anywhere -- it just remains what it was. 

Let's say you have a procedure step (numbered list paragraph) that applies only to Linux, so you apply the Linux condition to the entire paragraph. When you hide that condition, that step disappears. Hiding it has exactly zero effect on the preceding and following paragraphs that are still displayed (barring an unfortunate interaction of Keep With/Next settings affecting pagination, or something like that). 

If you have a Linux "Step 3" paragraph and a Windows "Step 3" paragraph, and either one or the other is hidden, depending on the output, then nothing on that page will change except which of the two paragraphs is shown and which is hidden. 


Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
------
rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-903-6372
------