Conditional Text Issue

[Huntley Eshenroder]

There are several different approaches, these are a few of my favorites:

   - if chapter-level content stays together, you can create different book
     files for each UM or QG and insert the relevant files as necessary

   - a more granular approach is to use text-insets; create text-insets for
     content that is used in more than one place. insert the text-inset
     by reference where necessary

-Huntley



On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Alison Craig
<Alison.Craig at ultrasonix.com> wrote:
> 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>
>
>
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