[Framers] Issue with conditional tagging

[TW Smith]

Your use of Conditional text kinda scares me. ;) I try to keep conditional
simpler and about what content you want to include. I have found
FrameMaker's conditional text feature to have a complexity curve that is
J-shaped, and when you use more of it, the complexity suddenly starts to
rise exponentially to the point decoding it becomes nuts. It sounds like
you are using conditional tags to identify reviewers and content editors,
for some reason?

Would an Acrobat review cycle be a better vehicle for you?

If you are accepting content from contributors, can you have them provide
Word documents? If you control the styles in Word, when you import them you
can just apply corresponding and identically-named FrameMaker styles. For
example, Body in Word comes into FrameMaker, where you apply your Body
FrameMaker style.

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Sean

On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 10:11 AM John Posada <jposada99 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Good morning, guys...
>
> I'm working my way through a conditional tag implementation and its 2 steps
> forward, one back.
>
> Here's the gist.
>
> I have 19 SMEs who are contributors of content...some only a few pages
> worth, and some who complete files.
>
> I've defined the 19 conditional tags, plus one for Undefined, assigned to
> topics where we don't know YET who the SME should be.
>
> I've defined all the conditions in a template document, then used it to
> copy the conditions to every file as a format import.
>
> For testing, I apply the Condition by displaying the file, pressing CTRL-A
> to select everything, then apply the condition. I do this for every file in
> the whole book and when I select the whole content, the Condition indicator
> shows an X, I then went back to several files and the content in the files
> is showing or not showing as appropriate. Everything to this point is hunky
> dory and at this point is where it goes south.
>
> Running the TOC. For some reason, even though nothing is displayed on the
> page (I've run PDFs to look at some of the pages, they STILL generate a
> line entry when I run the TOC.
>
> When I PDF the book, I get a PDF with lots of blank pages except for the
> page's header and footer.
>
> Question.. what DOES appear on each blank page is the header and footer.
> Would that be enough to reserve a spot on the TOC? Even if so, the Heading
> styles are not showing, from where would the TOC be taking its content
> from?
>
> Question: Is it possible that the conditional feature was never designed to
> exclude whole pages?
>
> Question...do I need to design a Master Page that doesn't contain a header
> and footer?
>
> Thanks, sorry this is so long.
>
> --
> John Posada
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