Selecting Colours for Conditions

Sun Apr 21 17:29:05 PDT 2013

Hi Alison

We're dealing with something similar by using conditions with colored text for product variations and conditions wiith background shading for feature variations. You could give your short/advanced conditions background shading instead of colored text. 

Cheers
Rebecca 

>>> Alison Craig <Alison.Craig at ultrasonix.com> 20/04/13 04:39 >>>

Thanks guys. Unfortunately, my original Conditions are for a very different purpose than what you describe.

We have 5 different hardware platforms for our medical device, but a large portion of the book is common to all platforms. Currently, my Conditions cover the differences between the platforms – and many times, the same info will pertain to only 1 or perhaps 2, 3 or 4 platforms, but not all five. By definition, those Conditions overlap.

I am now having to devise Short and Advanced versions of the book. Up to 95% of this will be covered by the inclusion/exclusion of Chapters and Appendices in a new book, but a small amount of content within the book files themselves will have to conditionalized as Short or Advanced. 

I was hoping to save a little time, but I guess that’s not possible.

As for overlapping Conditions ending up as magenta, I did have some of that problem, but I also had a problem with muddy blues and the khaki issue you mention. That’s why it took so long to determine the correct mix of colours in the first place – especially as I used to cover 6 platforms in one book, not just the 5 I currently do.

Alison

From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Böðvar Björgvinsson
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2013 4:00 AM
To: Helen Borrie
Cc: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Selecting Colours for Conditions

Great, Helen.

Another way of doing it might have been to create colors under the names of the condition names: eOnly, Print1, etc. That way you would not have to remember any color names or to which condition each color applied.

Cheers,
Bodvar Bjorgvinsson

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 4:28 AM, Helen Borrie <helebor at iinet.net.au> wrote:
At 09:17 a.m. 19/04/2013, Alison Craig wrote:
>Content-Language: en-US
>Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
>        boundary="_000_17474827509158478EE10BC6B977A3E30CC5A15342exchangeultra_"
>
>FM 9 Version: 9.0p255
>Unstructured
>OS: Windows 7, 64 bit
>
>Does anyone know if any kind of “guide” exists regarding the best colours to choose when creating Conditions?
>
>When I initially set up my Conditions, I spent a lot of time testing to see how colours blended when I had multiple Conditions applied to the same text (lots of combos ended up being virtually identical onscreen even though the combination of underlying colours were quite different). It didn’t make sense to use colours in the first place if I couldn’t tell where one combo stopped and the next one started.
>
>I now have to add 2 new conditions (on a tight deadline) so I really don’t have a lot of time to test things. If someone has put together some kind of guide, I’d really love to see it – if you’re willing to share.
Recently I broke up a very large eBook into three volumes for print.  It's the first time I've using conditionals seriously.  I followed the advice in Sarah O'Keefe's book and avoided having overlapping conditions.  I had to play around a bit until I got useful contrasts.

The book said that FM would show all overlapping conditions as magenta so it would be a good idea to avoid assigning magenta to a particular condition.  In fact, I never saw magenta at all;  all the overlaps that I had in my initial scheme (subsequently abandoned) came through as a sort of khaki when I did the conditionals for the first chapter.  That's when I decided Sarah was right and I should not try to piggyback the same conditions.

The scheme I ended up with was five conditions: eOnly, printOnly, Print1, Print2 and Print3.  (I have a navigation scheme built into the e-Version, which was not appropriate for the print books. The book will never have an omnibus print edition as it is waaaay too large.)

I picked the brightest possible high-contrast colours for the five conditions (avoiding magenta by Sarah's advice and blue because the Silicon Prairie indexing tools use blue for index markers.  I also avoided red because Fm8 seems to use it as a warning when conditions conflict in some way.)  I think I had forest green for eOnly, green for Print1, cyan for Print2, salmon for Print3 and dark blue for printOnly.

On thing I did find was that it is very easy to change the entire colour scheme.  Once I had it pinned down, I just kept a card by me with the colours on it, so I didn't have to think about it when repeatedly swapping condition markers between {a colour} and {As Is}.

HTH, maybe a little bit, anyway...
Helen

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