Re: Fixing condition text mess

["Rick Henkel" <frameuser@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Have you looked into FrameScript?

Rick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ed Treijs" <etreijs@algorithmics.com>
To: "'framers'" <framers@omsys.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 3:10 PM
Subject: Fixing condition text mess


> 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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