Re: Wish List - Conditional text COLUMNS IN A TABLE

["Thomas Michanek" <thomas.michanek@xxxxxxxxx>]

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RE: Wish List - Conditional text COLUMNS IN A TABLE
> I suppose you could work around it by making entire 
> tables conditional, with each conditional table having a column deleted.

There is another kludge that might work for you:
1. Set the Left and Right Default Cell Margins to 0 pt (necessary).
2. For each cell in the column (including header/footer rows),
   make the entire cell contents conditional (not the cell itself).
3. Hide the condition.
4. Select the entire column and shrink-wrap it (Esc t w).
The column is now very, very narrow and almost invisible ("hidden").

To "show" (expand) the column:
1. Show the condition. The column will probably NOT expand.
2. Select the entire column. This can be a bit tricky, but place the
   pointer on a horizontal line and Ctrl-double-click.
3. Un-shrinkwrap the column (Esc t w).

It works, but you cannot have any cell margins, and you will get 
double column lines for the "hidden" column.

> Some speculation about why Maker doesn't support this... Conditional 
> text is actually based on cut/paste. You mark something as conditional, 
> and when you hide it Maker scans the doc for the marked text, cuts it, 
> replaces it with a goofy marker, then pastes it on a "hidden" page.

This is true, for text elements that are made conditional.
But table *rows* that are made conditional are not moved to the
"hidden" page, they are still stored in the table, with a simple
indicator that the row is in fact conditional. But the row's contents
is stored in the same way as before.

The reason for this, and that a column cannot be made conditional,
is that the internal document model in FM is pretty fixed and hasn't
been changed or rewritten to support new features. New features have
to be implemented using the basic document model and restricted by
its limitations. Tables existed before conditional text (I think),
and since tables are stored row-by-row, it was fairly easy to make
rows conditional. It would probably have taken much more effort,
even rewriting how tables are stored in FM, to support conditional
columns too.

It is clear that Adobe doesn't want, and never will, rewrite the FM
code and the document model to support new features that require
such rewrites. This is why, for instance, Unicode "support" in FM7
was implemented using markers instead of rewriting the way characters
are stored. Perhaps Adobe will do such a rewrite for FM8, but they
are apparently very afraid to touch the internal workings of FM.


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Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
Technical Writer, Uppsala, Sweden
mailto:Thomas.Michanek@telia.com
http://go.to/framers/
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