Joseph:
What you are describing is exactly the sort of situation conditional text was
designed for. From the sound of things, you're bothered by the basic logic of
conditional text. You are not the first writer to experience this, and you will
not be the last. Nonetheless, I have a hard time imagining how adding another
layer of complexity is going to help you over that hump. My advice, good for
what you paid for it, is to put your chin into the breeze and perfect your
conditional text technique. With time, you will master it, and it will become
less confusing.
Concerning the specific issue you address, one way of dealing with the paragraph
mark issue is simply to get into the habit of adding a space to the end of every
line. Once upon a time, when memory was expensive, and mighty lizards ruled the
land, leaving an extra byte of padding at the end of a line was a pretty
profligate use of memory. Time to get over this. Adding an extra space character
makes not picking up the paragraph tag much easier. As for tracking, you need to
force your reviewers into reviewing a Windows draft and a Linux draft. I've
managed this with change bars only, and in newer versions of Frame, your
tracking only gets better.
Good luck,
--William
Joseph Lorenzini wrote:
Hi all,
I have recently encountered a documentation issue that I'd like feedback on.
I am documenting a software product. There are two versions of the product.
One version is for Windows. The other version is for Linux. The windows
version came after the Linux version and there are significant UI and
functional differences between the two. Originally, I was told that these
differences would eventually go away and that the user experience would be
identical on both operating systems. This hasn't happened. The differences
have grown.
This is problematic because a Linux user isn't going to care about
windows-only functionality and a windows user isn't going to care about
Linux-only functionality. At the same time, there are major similarities
between the two versions because they are the same software. It doesn't make
sense to create two different documents, which share a large amount of
information. This has led me finally to consider conditional text. I'd
create two tags: windows and linux. Then, I'll apply the tags to operating
system specific UI/functionality while leaving shared content alone.
Here's the thing though, I am not a fan of conditional text. I've learned
that i need to apply the tags in a very specific sequence and apply it to
preceding paragraph marks or otherwise hiding and showing the conditional
text introduces funky formatting into my book. I also think it makes
managing and tracking content in a document really tricky. So here are my
questions:
-is there a better mechanism than conditional text that I could use to get
the same result?
-If conditional text is the best solution, is there a framemaker plugin that
makes managing conditional text easier? Note that I am not interested in
FrameScript.
Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
--
William Abernathy
Berkeley, CA
http://yourwritereditor.com
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