🚀 go-pugleaf

Michael,

I think you're over-analyzing this and making it more complicated than
it should be.

Simple question, what happens when you use the Show/Hide conditional
settings, say for the 2nd edition?

If you are using the simple <$paratext[Head2]> building block in your
running header variable, then in the line:

(Conditional text tags) <2nd edition>2.1 | <3rd edition> 201.1
|-System Administration

assuming that everything is properly tagged, the "201.1" should
disappear and your running header should just show:

2.1-System Administration

Likewise, if you toggle settings to show the "3rd edition" and hide
the "2nd edition", the "2.1" should disappear leaving:

201.1-System Administration

The only time it will look strange is when you have both condition set
to show (or hide).

From your earlier response indicating that you get nothing (blank)
with the <$paranum(only)> blocks, I'm assuming that you aren't using
FM's autonumbering.

Q: why are you manually numbering? If the numbering sequences are
disjoint, then I can understand, but if it's because you couldn't get
two sets of numbers to visually appear on the same line, then there
are other ways around that.

You could use the run-in paragraph feature and set two separate
paratags for the edition autonumbers. Then run those into the actual
Head2 or Head3 paratags and conditionalize the complete paragraph
containing just the autonumber, e.g.

[Head2_2nd]2.1[Head2_3rd]201.1{RunIn separator= -}[Head2]System
Administration

where the [...] indicate paratags used.

In the header you can edit the running h/f variable to contain:

<$paranumonly[Head2_2nd,Head2_3rd]>-<$paratext[Head2]>

Then depending upon the condition applied to each paratag, FM will
search backward from the current page to find the first match in the
multiple variables indicated for the <$paranumonly>. Since one of
those will be hidden by the conditional Hide, you should see things
correctly in both the body and header.

For the TOC (or any other generated file), you just have to remember
this same trick of making things run-in and select all three Head2
paratags for generating the TOC.

I don't think you need to use markers at all, unless there are other
aspects of this that yo haven't shown.