Adobe

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ve likely seen my frustration in trying to get conditional text to work in a linked file scenario with FrameMaker 9 and RoboHelp 8. I’m writing this post to help others who may be struggling with this issue, and to alert Adobe to a need for better documentation for linked projects.

I’ve been a long-time single-sourcing practitioner (since 1996) and a long time FrameMaker user (since 1998). I am not new to the concept by any means, nor new to many of the tools used to single-source from FrameMaker source. I’ve used WebWorks ePublisher extensively since 1998, and have also used Mif2Go and Adobe Technical Communication Suite (TCS) 1 in the past.

As per all my past experiences, I’ve defined and applied conditional tags in FrameMaker, set the show/hide settings throughout the book,  and used the conversion application at-hand to use the conditional settings to produce conditionalized output with great success. Perhaps it was this past experience that caused me so much grief in TCS 2, because it appears that either a change to FrameMaker or a change in the conditional logic between it and RohoHelp had changed for linked documents.

I had gone my usual route, and despite what settings I apply in RoboHelp, the content from my book – though conditioned – was produced unconditioned in the output. That is, content I wanted to hide was showing up in the output.

After much tweaking of every setting in RoboHelp, and an exhaustive search in the online Help, user forums, and other info sources, my eyes focused on a particular phrase in the RoboHelp online Help:

The expression uses Boolean logic operators (OR, AND, NOT) to form phrases that exclude content marked with a tag.

It was then that I turned my attention back to the new UI in FrameMaker, and sure enough in the Show/Hide Conditional Text window I saw another option/radio button: Show as per Expression

Now, I had seen this and tinkered with it before in FrameMaker, but I noticed that the expression changed even when I modified the Show as per Condition option. I paid it no mind at first, because it was mirroring my selections regardless. I had at one point chosen the by Expression option, and it performed in FrameMaker as expected. Further, if I closed the Show/Hide control and reopened it, the selection defaulted back to by Condition. All the more reason for me to ignore it.

Or so I thought.

Staring at that bit of Help text describing Boolean logic set bells off in my brain. I quickly opened FrameMaker, set the option to by Expression, and generated my RoboHelp output. Lo! and Behold! It worked! This seemingly inconsequential option in FrameMaker held the key to allowing my conditions to be used in RoboHelp!

So for anyone else struggling with conditional text in a linked FM>RH scenario, here are two simple things you need to do:

1. In RoboHelp, select File > Project Settings, click Edit next to Edit conversion settings for FrameMaker documents, click Other Settings in the FrameMaker setting panel, and then select the Apply FrameMaker Conditional Text Build Expression check box.
2. In FrameMaker, open your book file, select View > Show/Hide Conditional Text, and select Show as per Expression (editing the expression if needed).

That’s it!

Some observations:

Since the Show as per Condition and Show as per Expression options seem to inherit from one another in FrameMaker, I would think it would make a heck of a lot of sense to have RoboHelp use Show as per Expression by default or allow the option in RoboHelp to use this option, rather than rely on the FrameMaker content to be pre-configured to use this option. This would remove a lot of human error, particularly in a multi-author environment or in a scheduled build environment.

The RoboHelp online help assumes the user knows to use this option in FrameMaker and talks around the use of Boolean expressions but doesn’t pinpoint the selection of that option in FrameMaker within any of its procedures.

The FrameMaker 9 UI, while slick, really needs work. Many of the controls insist on certain options being selected before others to use a feature (as is with applying a condition to text – try it, use different options in that control in different orders and see what happens) but the UI itself isn’t designed to call attention to this order of operation. Either the UI needs an update or the use of these controls needs to be reprogrammed. In either case, it needs more UX testing, IMHO.

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