Auto-applied Conditions not showing up in Text Editor

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rjplano
Propeller Head
Posts: 51
Joined: Tue May 05, 2020 10:08 am

Auto-applied Conditions not showing up in Text Editor

Post by rjplano »

Here's the situation. I have a PDF document that goes through several iterations. Additions and deletions between versions are marked as green underlined text and red line-through text, respectively, typically using spans or paragraph styles. What I would like to do for the final 'clean' version is remove the formatting from the added text and completely remove the deleted text from the document. So far I've basically been going through the document and manually removing styles and deleting text. Because of the various styles used in the document I have over a dozen separate styles for the added text and another dozen or so for deleted text, making a regular expression or other type of global search and replace kind of difficult to come up with (for me, at least).

One thought I came up with is to add a Condition tag to each of the styles used to format the deleted text, e. g., mc-conditions: "Formatting. ToBeRemoved". That way, every piece of to-be-deleted text will have a specific condition applied to it so I could then use the "Find Elements" capability in Flare to find and delete all the content with that condition tag applied. The problem is that the tag does not consistently appear in the topic when viewed in Text Editor. If I right-click on the span or paragraph and select "Conditions...", the ToBeRemoved tag is shown to be applied and if the project is built with that condition set to be excluded, it behaves as expected. But a search for the condition tag itself in the topic comes up empty.

I have found that sometimes opening and closing the topic causes the tag to appear. Reapplying the condition works as well, but neither of those processes are something I want to go through with the several dozen topics and hundreds of instances I have in the project.

Anyone know how to the auto-applied condition tags to consistently appear in the topic?

Thanks.
doloremipsum
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 290
Joined: Mon Aug 26, 2019 2:11 pm

Re: Auto-applied Conditions not showing up in Text Editor

Post by doloremipsum »

If you've applied the conditional tag to your styles in the stylesheet, I wouldn't expect it to occur in the XML code of the topic - so I don't think you could find that using a find-and-replace. I'm not sure why it's not appearing consistently in the text editor.

I think you're making this more complicated than it needs to be, though - Find Elements should work fine. As far as I understand you have various styles that look like:
p.bodytext
p.bodytextnew
p.bodytextdeleted

To clean this up, you'll just need a couple of find-and-replaces:
Find p.bodytextnew - Replace with p.bodytext
Find p.bodytextdeleted - Remove tag

And then just repeat for each style. I wouldn't expect it to take very long for each one.

Also, I hate to ask, but is there are reason you created all of these special styles instead of using the Track Changes feature? For PDF or Word output you can enable the Preserve Tracked Changes option in the target.
in hoc foro dolorem ipsum amamus, consectimur, adipisci volumus.
rjplano
Propeller Head
Posts: 51
Joined: Tue May 05, 2020 10:08 am

Re: Auto-applied Conditions not showing up in Text Editor

Post by rjplano »

You may be right that I may be making this more complicated and I'll take your suggestions under advisement.

The Track Changes capability in Flare does not come close to doing what I need. I need added text to be green and underlined and deleted text to be red with a line-through. I sometimes need the changed text to have a yellow background along with the special formatting. I need change bars aligned with the actual line where the change takes place, not at the first line of the paragraph that contains the change. The "Preserve tracked changes" option is far from intuitive and doesn't present changes the way I need them to be shown. Plus a few other reasons I don't recall right now. Track Changes is one of Flare's weakest and most undeveloped features.


Thanks!
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