Over the past year, Donna and a few techwhirlers have given me great advice about single sourcing and efficient use of conditional text. I implemented a lot of their ideas (thank you again!) and am about to implement even more of them (with an eye to future chunking with XML).
One of the problems I had then, and did not have a chance to resolve at the time, was how best to handle word-level conditional text, as in the following paragraph, where each color represents a conditional tag:
The ShareScan client is installed on a MEAP-enabled Canon® imageRUNNER™Ricoh SDK/ J-enabled deviceScanStation
. It displays the user interface in the device's control panel and handles user input.
BACKGROUND:
- Our product runs on two platforms: "embedded" and ScanStation. Our embedded scanning application runs in the device, appearing in the device's control panel. Our ScanStation client application runs on a PC attached to a scanning device; the user interface appears on a touch screen.
- I output nine vendor-specific installation guides from a set of FrameMaker files -- embedded (2 guides), TWAIN only (4 guides), and combination of a "push" product with TWAIN for the same vendor (3 guides). I have a book file for each vendor-specific guide.
- I created a variables file for each guide. It contains 2-3 variables: partnumber, platform, and trademark. So far I've only imported the variables into the title page, not into the chapter files.
- The nine guides are translated into French, Italian, German, and Spanish. I have read that word-level conditional text is strongly discouraged in the localization world.
QUESTIONS:
- The "platform" variable, as it currently exists in the variables document, doesn't "fit" into all locations in the chapter documents; I don't always need to use the full product name, and sometimes the structure of the sentence leads to a bad fit. Is it best to create two flavors of "platform" variable, for example, "platform-title" to use in the TitlePage document and "platform-chap" to use in the chapters?
- Would you conditionalize "in the device's control panel" (which applies only to the embedded platform) in the sentence or, to avoid a word-level condition, repeat the entire sentence and conditionalize each for the appropriate platform?
- Would it be better to turn this type of paragraph into three conditionalized text insets (one for MEAP, one for Ricoh, and one for ScanStation) that are then imported into the container chapter?
Cheers and thanks for all the interesting personal information!
Carol
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