Lost Conditions

[GDonn]

I'm still wet behind the ears so please forgive me if I'm missing something obvious. I'm trying to set up a project template for pdf output and everything is going fine, stylesheet is awesome, page layouts for pdf look great and are assigned to template topics, variables defined etc. Everything is working except...all of my conditions selections (button on the home page, right click menus) are grayed out. If I select a paragraph or any other selection in a topic I'm not able to assign conditional tags. I have product specific information I would like to designate and have a condition tag set but cannot use it or even the default one in the template. Any ideas as to why this functionality simply disappeared?

[emsachs]

This is not normal or obvious behavior. The only thing I could guess is if the ConditionTagSets folder somehow got corrupted or renamed. If the conditions file is in some other location it doesn't seem to work.

If you have tech support, I would definitely contact them.

[sdcinvan]

I'm still wet behind the ears so please forgive me if I'm missing something obvious. I'm trying to set up a project template for pdf output and everything is going fine, stylesheet is awesome, page layouts for pdf look great and are assigned to template topics, variables defined etc. Everything is working except...all of my conditions selections (button on the home page, right click menus) are grayed out. If I select a paragraph or any other selection in a topic I'm not able to assign conditional tags. I have product specific information I would like to designate and have a condition tag set but cannot use it or even the default one in the template. Any ideas as to why this functionality simply disappeared?

I want to help you but you need to supply more information... such as:
a) What troubleshooting have you tried? (i.e. did you restart Flare, reset Flare's layout, tested a backup project from an earlier date - you are making daily backups, right?)
b) Which version of Flare are you using?
c) Does this behavior exist in other projects?

[GDonn]

I think there are a lot of variables going on here that I need to work through. This is pretty much my second stab at a project. The first went pretty smoothly but now I'm seeing some things that I did that I'll have to rethink. I'm in Flare 11 btw.

First off, I'm working on virtual Windows on a Mac and we keep all of our files in Dropbox...I have all of my prior work done on the Mac side in Word but I don't have Word on my Win side (docs done in Word for Mac can be somewhat different when opened in Windows but that's an entirely different issue).

I'm thinking that my problem stems from the fact that I created a "template" project and copied and pasted it to another folder in dropbox then renamed it (duh, I should have figured I'd be opening a huge can of worms doing that, but hey, I've been in the Word environment for a long time). I'm seeing some other frustrating things going on like images that were set for backgrounds in css and table styles missing (where I see the file paths have gone astray when I dig into the stylesheets), and my auto-numbering (that I spent a long time figuring out in css) has gone off too. So, I'm smacking my own hands for doing that. Trying to run before I can crawl!!

The first thing I'm going to do is to put my template into the local template folder on my Win side and forget about sharing anything with my coworkers on the cloud till I have this working correctly. I think it will be much easier to troubleshoot. I'll try this first and report back. Thanks for the responses!

[GDonn]

OK...so I re-did my template locally and kept an eye on the Conditions button in a sample topic. Everything was going fine till I assigned my custom stylesheet to the project and target properties...then it grayed out. Pulled my hair for a moment then closed the project and reopened it...voila! The Conditions button is back!. One of the things I find frustrating is that even after saving I sometimes have to close a topic and reopen it to see the results and in some cases, it appears I'll have to remember to close and reopen Flare. I had the same issue with v10. I'm going to finish up this file and save it as a template then try it out on some content and see what happens.

[ChoccieMuffin]

Have you been editing the stylesheet recently? It's possible there could be a problem in there somewhere.

If you open it in a text editor like Notepad++ (or any other that colours the text appropriately) if you see that it all turns blue lower down, you might have a missing semi-colon. I can be a nightmare trying to find that kind of thing, but it's worth taking a look, just in case.

[NorthEast]

If it only occurs when you use a particular stylesheet, my guess is that you've disabled the style MadCap|conditionalText in that stylesheet.

You can check this by selecting Options > Disable Styles on the stylesheet editor toolbar.

Or if you look at the CSS in the text editor, it will look like this:

Code: Select all

MadCap|conditionalText
{
	mc-disabled: true;
}