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Online Use and Conditional Text

If you take the position of many in the technical writing profession that the information should be tailored for the delivery medium, then FrameMaker is the tool that can help achieve this goal while keeping with the single-source techniques.

Using FrameMaker’s conditional text feature, a single FM document can contain language that is specific to the output format. This is most likely to occur when creating cross-references. If your text isn’t completely neutralized from:

(Print/PDF) Please refer to “Subject X” on page n.

(Online) Please refer to the topic “Subject X.”

to simply:

Please refer to “Subject X”.

you can still employ conditional text so that both the print and online versions co-exist in the same document.

FrameMaker offers much freedom in how you structure your conditional text. However, most who use conditional text recommend that it be employed at the paragraph level, rather than at the sentence, phrase, or word level.

The issues with conditional text fragments smaller than paragraphs center around where spaces and punctuation should appear. Who owns the spaces and punctuation? The parent text or the conditional fragment.

Particularly when multiple writers are involved, it easy to create inadvertently fragments that don’t have enough or have too much leading/trailing spaces and punctuation for the selected condition.



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Open-Source tools compliments of Voyant Technologies, Inc. and Glenn C. Maxey.
01/13/2003

TP Tools v2-00-0a

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