MadCap Software Forums

Background: I am using Flare 7. I am working with a group unfamiliar with Flare and resistant to change; I'm not going to be able to persuade them to use Contributor as a review tool.

I need to be able to include internal notes that can be excluded for specific targets. I can use the annotation feature -- but annotations can't be presented in compiled output, as far as I can tell. So, I created a condition, IntrnlNt, for internal notes. That way, I can include or exclude them in output. But I want to draw a reviewer's attention to that content, so I changed the MadCap:conditionalText style to add a background highlight.

Bad move ... that changes the appearance for all conditions, not just my IntrnlNt condition. Most of those conditions are included in outputs, so I can't use that style as a solution. So I reset that style, then created a separate style to highlight the IntrnlNt content.

That means two steps rather than one, each time I want to mark content as an internal note. I set the condition, then add the style. If there were way to attach a style to a condition, that would be a big help.

I'd welcome any thoughts others may have on this.

Unless this changed in v9, you can't apply a style to a condition because the condition doesn't actually appear in the output. That is, in the authoring environment, you might see <p MadCap:conditions="Default.IntrnlNt">, but in the output, it's just <p>. There's no span tag associated with conditions; either the content is in the output or it isn't.

What I suggest is that you create a generic class called .IntrnlNt and set its background color to something obviously, then apply that generic class to the paragraph, text, table, etc., that you want to draw attention to. That background color will appear in the generated output so your reviewers can find it. As you make changes to the content in response to their feedback, you remove the generic class for the paragraph, text, table, etc. Before the final delivery, you can create a report or do a find to find all instances of IntrnlNt to make sure they've all been addressed. If they haven't but you want to include the content in the output without the color, then you temporarily modify the .IntrnlNt style to have a background color of none. After delivering the output, you can turn the background color back on for the next round of edits and reviews.

Thanks for the thoughts, Lisa. In this situation, that won't work because I want to be able to present a draft version in a target (with internal comments excluded) to certain third parties, while maintaining the internal comments in another target. The include/exclude aspect of the condition is actually more important than the style of the condition.

It's not a monumental thing to have to apply a condition as well as a separate style. It just seemed odd to me that conditions do have styles, but they're "one size fits all" -- all conditions share the same style set.

If I could get people on board with Contributor, then the annotation feature would be the way to go. We'd have our internal dialog that is not part of the targeted output.

This is an old ticket, but I'd like to note the resolution. As of Madcap Flare 2018 R2 (and quite possibly earlier), styles have an mc-conditions setting under the Unclassified group that will present a list of conditions that can be applied to the style, just as you would apply conditions to selected text. Selecting the style then also selects the condition settings. So, rather than linking a style to a condition, I can link conditions to a style dedicated to that purpose.