Re: Conditional content - what do you do with it?

[Rick Stone <rstone75 -at- kc -dot- rr -dot- com>]

Hi Kevin

I know you say you are using Flare, but perhaps it has a feature similar 
to RoboHelp. In RoboHelp you have an ability to turn off the cross hatch 
shading. Perhaps Flare offers a similar feature?

Cheers... Rick :)

McLauchlan, Kevin wrote:
> Back in the day, I used conditions in simple ways in FrameMaker. 
>
> More recently, but still several years ago, I used conditional  
> text in RoboHelp, and started getting a little fancy with it. 
>
> That eventually bit me in the butt, and necessitated a huge 
> amount of work in a short time to fix, to my satisfaction. 
> So I began easing myself out of the use of conditions, 
> even as I was switching from RH to Flare as my HAT. 
>
> Even so, I still had conditions in place, especially in 
> help sets that had not been updated in a while. 
>
> While I found that I could trust conditions to behave as 
> expected in Flare, I still found the other problem that had 
> annoyed me. Both RH (as I recall....) and Flare use colored 
> cross-hatching on text, and colored icons in ToCs and file 
> lists, to show where a given condition is applied. 
>
> When text is given one or two conditions, that's manageable, 
> but when a block of text might have four or more cross-hatchings 
> applied to parts or all, it becomes visual mush. 
>
> My color perception is reasonably good; I can always pick 
> out the 'hidden' numbers and letters in the tests. 
> I'm not officially visually handicapped - I just have "the 
> biggest honkin' floaters <my ophthalmologist has> seen in 
> <his> twenty years of practice!" - but still, I find that 
> the visual clutter can be daunting. Makes reviewing 
> and editing a misery. But part of an editing pass is to 
> determine/confirm which bits should be included/excluded in 
> this-or-that circumstance. So some of my topics are 
> about as easy to read in WYSIWYG source as are government 
> documents that have gone through... ahem... redaction.
> Makes ransom notes easy on the eyes, by comparison. 
>
> Maybe that's just me.
>
> So what is the experience of others, and what do you 
> normally do with conditions? Do you allow them to 
> overlay? Do you break out text-and-illustrations to a 
> new page or snippet as soon as it looks like more than 
> one or two conditions might need applying if the content 
> remained on the original parent page? 
>
> Other? 
>
> For that matter, how is conditional text/content 
> depicted in the interface of HATs other than RH and 
> Flare? 
>
> I find that after you've hit three layers of colored 
> cross-hatching, you are pretty much looking at brown. 
> But then, that's what I said about the curtain material 
> my wife picked out "It's got this bit of gold to pick 
> up this accessory, and this thin red stripe to pick up 
> the furniture fabric and that other little stripe to 
> catch the painting behind the sofa ..."  
> "But Dear, from more than three feet away, it all 
> looks brown to me."  
> "Brown!?  That's what you say about tweed - 'it 
> all looks grey' to you.   
> "Well, yeah. It could have a million colors in it, 
> but step back ten feet and every tweed jacket and 
> skirt in the world is grayish brown... or brown-ish 
> gray."      :-)
>
> What works out there? For HATs and conditions, I 
> mean, not fabric selection. 
>
> How small a unit do you conditionalize? 
> Do you actually go within-page to apply conditions 
> on chunks of text, or do you confine your conditions 
> to the topic-page-file level?
>
> I feel that I should be getting much more use and 
> convenience out of the conditional feature. 
> One of the product lines that I document has five 
> major products that share a good 30 percent of 
> their content globally, while several pairs within 
> the group would have as much as 70-percent commonality.
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