RE: Conditional text does not exclude correctly

[John Pitt <jpitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeremy,

I am with you all the way on this one. My present project, which includes
generating online Help from four products in one manual and replicating in
eight languages (including CJK), is made extremely difficult because of
Frame's inability to exclude conditions.

And if Mark Hilton is listening and taking notes, please add the ability to
exclude un-conditionalised text.

J

> John Pitt, Technical Writer
> Wilcom Pty Ltd
> (02) 9578 5176
> mailto:jpitt@wilcom.com.au
> or
> mailto:johnpitt@zeta.org.au
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From:	jeremy@omsys.com [SMTP:jeremy@omsys.com]
> Sent:	Sunday, March 14, 1999 5:50 AM
> To:	Framers@FrameUsers.com; framers@omsys.com
> Cc:	Ginny Barnett
> Subject:	Re: Conditional text does not exclude correctly
> 
> On Tue, 09 Mar 1999 14:50:10 -0600, Ginny Barnett
> <barnett@chesapeake.tokheim.com> wrote:
> 
> >We have a manual that is customized according to customer and functional
> >levels.  Most of the text conditions are working fine, but there are a
> few
> >that aren't doing what I need them to do.  (For technical people - the 
> >"conditional text" function seems to act as a logical OR instead of a 
> >logical AND.)
> 
> [long and clear example snipped]
> 
> >(There are actually 15 condition tags for these manuals, variously
> combined to
> >result in 30 manual versions.  If I have to start creating condition tags
> that
> >include several conditions -- i.e., one tag that says Customer A, Level
> 2, as
> >opposed to two separate tags -- I think I'll start pulling my hair out!)
> 
> The lack of a logical AND is certainly a major deficiency in the otherwise
> excellent Conditional Text facility.  And it would appear relatively
> simple
> to fix in FM itself, at the point where a section of text is evaluated to
> determine if it goes to the "hidden page" or not.  It would involve a
> change
> in the UI dialog to allow expressions using conditions, but that's also a
> simple one for Adobe's programmers.  For users, though, it's a wall.
> 
> However, if you can't go through the wall, sometimes you can go around.  I
> thought about this, and recalled that in Boolean algebra, you can restate
>   A AND B
> as
>   NOT ((NOT A) OR (NOT B))
> It's easier to see if you draw the little picture of the overlapping
> circles,
> but I can't do that here.  So how does this apply to Conditional Text?
> Well,
> if you exclude all the conditions that do not apply, then you are left
> with
> what you wanted.  That is, if you exclude Customers B and C, you are left
> with only Customer A.  If you exclude Level 2, you are left with Level 1.
> Therefore your remaining document, that last NOT, is what you wanted.
> 
> Unfortunately, Conditional Text has no NOT operator either.  But there is
> still one more trick... we have Find/Change.  And we can Find text by the
> Conditions applied to it.  So... you can Find Customer B, Customer C, and
> Level 2, and Replace it with *nothing*.  You are left with your desired
> Customer A and Level 1.  (Remember, you can use Shift with the arrows to
> move *all* the conditions from one box to another at once.)
> 
> Obviously you want to do this to a clone of your document, not the master,
> because next you will have to Save, reflow, and regenerate to get the
> xrefs,
> page breaks, and TOC/IX right, before you can print.  You may also want to
> script the process, so you can run your several print versions
> overnight...
> Find/Change is not swift, and there's no replacement for it that will
> handle
> Conditional Text correctly.  But it may be better than using the
> combinational
> tags that would have cost you your hair...  ;-)  It depends on how many of
> those combinations you would have; under 10, I'd use the combinational
> tags.
> 
> Now, if only the Show/Hide dialog allowed AND and NOT, in unlimited-length
> expressions with parentheses, you could do it all in one doc set.
> Wouldn't
> that be nice?  Word has nothing like it; it builds on FrameMaker's
> strength
> and makes it even more powerful, and it's so easy to code... really!
> 
> -- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
>    (jeremy@omsys.com)     http://www.omsys.com/
> ** To subscribe to Free Framers, email the message **
> ** body "subscribe framers" to majordomo@omsys.com **
> 
> ** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
> ** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **

** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **