Fixing condition text mess

[Ed Treijs <etreijs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi;

We have a number of books that have accumulated a lot of template/format
crud over the years.  (They are "special" docs, indeed!)

The current problem is that the chapters have a semi-random collection of
miscellaneous conditional tags, many of which are apparently from years ago
and quite obsolete.  When regenerating the book, it's easy to get
"inconsistent show/hide setting" and  "inconsistent conditional indicator"
errors.

Another problem is that we don't know if there is any conditionally-tagged
text we actually need.  Likely, there isn't any conditional text; and if
there is, we don't need it.  Unfortunately, a quick look-through reveals
that at least one conditional text indicator is set to as-is and black, so
it's not at all obvious when you look through the docs.

Needless to say, no one around here can say anything about the history of
the conditional text tags.

So what to do?

We don't have any batch facilities, and although we do have access to a few
UNIX licences, I don't see that macros are of much help--they don't record
mouse clicks and I don't see how you can delete a macro (in FM5.5 UNIX)
without a few mouse clicks along the way.

The simplest, most reliable approach I can see is to go into each file and
merrily delete all conditional text formats.  If there is text that is
actually tagged conditionally, the warning dialog lets us stop and
investigate.

The drawback to this approach is that it's pretty tedious when you're
dealing with 10 conditional text formats per file, 10 or 20 files per book,
and 20 or so books.  Click-click-click-click....!

(The number of files also argues against MIF conversion and editing, because
by the time you've converted to MIF, edited the MIF, and returned to FM
format you may as well just have done the brute-force condition-deleting
approach.)

The other possible approach I can think of is to standardize the settings of
the (too many) conditional text formats by importing conditional text
formats and settings.  The drawback here is that the tags are indeed
miscellaneous, and vary from doc to doc.  So ensuring that all tags are set
to "Hide" requires going through the docs anyway, because there may be
unique tags that weren't updated by the format import. 

Any exciting labour-saving ideas out there that might help us in this task?

Ed (fortunately they are not *my* docs!) Treijs

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