Strategies for Conditional Text
in FrameMaker 8
Terry Smith
DITA/TECHCOMM
November 2008

About the presenter
Technical Consultant, Scriptorium Publishing,
based in Research Triangle Park, NC
FrameMaker ACE
Authored updates to Publishing Fundamentals:
FrameMaker 8

Agenda
Purpose of conditional content
Marking text as conditional
Options for processing conditional content in
unstructured FrameMaker
Attribute filtering in structured FrameMaker

Determine the conditional
text “dimensions” you need

Which content can be
conditional?

Marking conditional content
in regular FrameMaker
Choice 1: Never allow condition tags to overlap
Choice 2: Always (or just sometimes) allow
overlapping condition tags

Regular FrameMaker
Show/Hide conditions: Each condition is either
showing or hidden (despite misleading
Conditional Text dialog box that implies other
options).
Conditional expressions: These let you combine
conditional operators (those used in Boolean
expressions) for more flexibility.

Traditional conditional text:
applying one tag only
Good: Easy to see which condition tags are
applied.
Bad: May need lots of condition tags.

One tag only: up to 32
condition tags needed

Traditional conditional text:
layering every condition tag
that applies
Good: May need (somewhat) fewer tags.
Bad: Difficult to manage the tags.

Layering condition tags: only
18 tags (not 32)

Layered tags hard to manage

Demo of Show/Hide
conditions
Applying conditions
Show/Hide
Showing condition indicators

Conditional expressions
require minimum number of
condition tags

Conditional Expressions
Mix of condition tags (some layered, some not)
= Challenging conditional expressions
Consistently layered tagging = easy conditional
expressions

Demo of conditional
expressions
Building an expression
Showing “as per expression”

Condition tags retained in
XML, but not part of
structure

Structured FrameMaker
Attributes and filtering available for structured
FrameMaker only.
Filter which conditional content shows in
output based on attributes.
Filtering is at the element level.

Marking conditional content
in structured FrameMaker
Specify only one value for a single attribute.
You can specify values for multiple attributes.

Attribute filtering goes beyond
conditional text functionality
Can filter on multiple attributes.
Product = “Pro” AND Output = “Print” AND
Platform = “UNIX”
Conditional tags are always combined as OR.
Excellent approach for content with numerous
conditions.

Downside: Visual indicators
not available
You Cannot use colors to indicate attribute
filtering unless you add on to FrameMaker:
ABCM
Sourcerer
Custom FDK client
FrameScript

Structured FrameMaker
setup
Your document's structure must allow some
attributes you can use for your conditional
content.

Add attributes for filtering
to EDD
Add attributes to all elements you may want to
make conditional.
For XML, you need to change the files that
make up the structured application to process
any attributes you add.
No additional changes needed for print and
PDF (Save As PDF).

Marking structured content
as conditional
Specify one value for attribute.
Structure may allow multiple values for a single
attribute, but filter by attribute doesn’t process
multiple values on a single attribute.
You can specify both condition tags and
attributes, but you can only use one to set
which conditions show in FrameMaker.

Demo of filter by attribute
Specify attribute values.
Build filter.
Apply filter.
Validate for each attribute filter.

Contact information
Scriptorium Publishing
Research Triangle Park, NC, USA
www.scriptorium.com
tsmith@scriptorium.com
919-481-2701, x113