🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello,
My advice to everyone is avoid conditional text. Not because of any difficulty with the FM implementation, but rather because of the inability of humans to define significant names and associated meanings for conditions.

There's the standard condition "comments" - a good name with an unambiguous meaning. You can either hide them or show them. Now consider "Bill's comment" as a condition. At first glance it's just like the standard "comments". What if someone decides to apply the condition to a piece of text that should be in the manual because Bill commented that the particular text should be in the manual.

Now there's confusion, because some "comments" need to be shown and others hidden for final publication.

Therein lies the fundamental problem of conditional text. Not the FM feature but getting a group of people to react identically to a number of alternatives.

I am working on a document just now that has been prepared by a committee of engineers to be published as an industry standard. I have found one line that has so many conditions on it that the condition names run of the edge of the status line bottom left of the screen. The document actually contains such conditions as "Bill's comment" and "Sean's suggestions". In all there are 37 user defined conditions and, above all, nobody ever documented decisions to invent another decision. Basically this Frame document is useless to anyone except the committee secretary who has now left the role and is unreachable.

Someone in this forum, a few weeks ago came up with the idea of defining and documenting all conditions in a chapter attached to the template or manual. That way anyone can see and try out the significance of show and hide for a given condition. I have always used a readme.txt file that contained decisions about the contents of a manual until I heard about this better idea.

So conditional text has a number of positive advantages. But it is the swiftest way to foul up the content, short of encrypting the file and thowing away the key, if conditions are not unique in their name and interpretation, applied uniquely to any particular part of a document, agreed by the team, and documented unambiguously.

Can this be so difficult for wordsmiths?
Cheers
Ian