Wrong conditional text displaying when using FM Track Changes facility

[Fred Ridder]

But do please consider the piece of advice that Richard offered in his original response to avoid conditionalize such small units of content. Conditionalizing single characters rather than the whole word (or in your case number) that contains them really makes it *much* more diffucult to maintain the document and to see when the conditions are not displaying correctly. Some of us who have had to live with highly conditionalized documents have gone so far as to always conditionalize the complete sentence when there is more than one conditional difference within the sentence.

Conditionalizing single characters requires a high degree of fussiness in making selections before applying the condition. It is *much* easier to double-click a word to select the whole thing and then apply the condition.

When you have 2 or 3 conditions applied to the same word, it is easy to accidentally delete the marker for one of the hidden conditions, breaking the sentence in a way that is hard to see.

When you conditionalize individual characters, it is not obvious when the show/hide logic is acting up and it often requires a *very* close reading to detect the errors. In your example, 108.00 does not look like an error unless you are really familiar with the material to know that the value is out of range. Only one specific error case (the case Winfried described where neither conditions is shown) produces a fairly obvoius result, but even in the case of ".00" you still have to be reading closely to see it. If you conditionalize the whole string "10.00" with condition A and the whoe string "8.00" with condition C, you will get nothing at all if neither condition shows and something clearly anomalous like "10.008.00" or "8.0010.00" if boith conditions show.

-Fred Ridder


> Subject: RE: Wrong conditional text displaying when using FM Track Changes facility
> Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:35:00 -0700
> From: HBailey at PLXTech.com
> To: wreng at tycoint.com; framers at lists.frameusers.com
> 
> Very interesting! I'll test the different views and see what happens.
> Thank you for the hints!
> Cheers,
> Heidi