Conditional Text Issue

[Alison Craig]

Version: FM9 (9.0p237)
OS: XP Pro with SP3

Caveat: I've only been using FM for about 6 or 7 months and I am a documentation department of 1.

We've just released our first User Manuals (UMs) in FrameMaker.

Before applying any conditions, I had an up front discussion with my boss and his boss about deciding on conditions BEFORE implementation as it is a lot more work to monkey around with them later. We decided that we would combine four UMs in one. Creating conditions for these options was not difficult and management was extremely happy they got four manuals in the time it would normally take to write 1-1/2 in MS Word.

Now however, the powers that be have decided that "we" also want to create Quick Guides (QG) from the same content. The 4 UMs run between 356 and 424 pages with at least 75% of the content shared between all 4. The thinking is that the QGs would be about 50 pages each - a decision reached arbitrarily rather than based on what should be included!

I can create new books using the some of same files (the 7 Appendices would likely not have any QG content which eliminates 73-93 pages of content), but I really don't want to have to conditionalize every bit of content in every chapter in order to include only QG material in the QGs. With 75% content reuse between UMs that's a lot of text to deal with and a maintenance headache.

Is my logic screwy or am I looking at this problem correctly?

Is there a way to spit out a conditional manual that ignores all unconditionalized text and only gives you the text you conditionalize?

If anyone has any suggestions on the approach I should take, I would be very grateful.

Alison

Alison Craig, Technical Writer
Ultrasonix Medical Corporation
Tel: (604) 279-8550, ext 127
E-mail: alison.craig at ultrasonix.com<mailto:alison.craig at ultrasonix.com>