Applying condition tags within paragraphs - best practice?

[rogersm]

Hi there,

At a recent Flare training course, we were told how to apply condition tags to topics, folders. paragraphs, and images. It looks like you can also apply condition tags to selected text in a paragraph.

Is it best practice to only apply condition tags to paragraphs or is it okay to also apply condition tags to selected phrases or sentences within a paragraph? It might be useful for us to sometimes apply condition tags to selected text (or sentences) within a pararaph, but I can see that you might need to be careful with spaces so am just wondering what other people do and if there is a best practice.

thanks,
mark

[Rene Severens]

Hi,

It is possible to use condition tags for every character if you want to.
However,
- It becomes very difficult to edit older text unless you can remember exactly why you used one or more condition tags. You will end up spending a lot of time just to edit one word that could have been edited in a few seconds instead.
- In case the text is going to be translated, giving a translator a full sentence is easier than a line of text containing a lot of parts that are conditioned and maybe do not have to be translated. In a different language specific phrases will be used in a different order and with a lot of conditioning the order of words can get turned around getting incorrect lines of text as a result.

Best practice for me is to be able to edit existing text in the shortest time possible. This results in most paragraphs being adjusted for a specific product(version) and conditioned for that product(version). In case the greater part of the paragraph is still the same I turn that part into a snippet.

Greetings,
Rene Severens

[rogersm]

Thanks for that Rene. I guess the best practice would be to apply condition tags at a paragraph level from what you are saying.

[Mike Kelley]

Not necessarily. It just depends on your needs. We use several conditions to tailor our output based on audience. Here's a couple of examples:

• You're single-sourcing an Admin Guide and a User Guide from the same topics. You could use conditions to mark "Admin-only" phrases, words, code blocks, paragraphs, images, or literally whatever you want out of the User Guide target.
• You're single-sourcing a cloud-based guide and a premise-based guide from the same topics. Perhaps sometimes the only difference between the two different outputs for a specific section needs to be some sort of phrasing. You enter both phrases, condition one as cloud and the other as premise, then apply those conditions to your cloud and premise targets.

[ajturnersurrey]

I learnt that you should never condition anything at a lower level than a single word by tying myself in knots with cunning condition combinations that worked beautifully but were VERY hard to maintain and certainly would be a nightmare for translation.

I'd agree that conditions at sentence level is the best practice minimum, but as mentioned above I do have some single sourced docs that have demanded other things. Such as where a topic used in a User Guide is valid for a single software version and product, but in an Apps Note needs to mention the software versions and products that need a particular step. Here I would carefully condition text such as ' (from software version aaaa onwards)'.

I would say don't forget the possible potential of a variable, which is set at target level. For example, I have a ThisDoc variable which might be 'section' when the topics are used in User Manuals and 'Application Note' when used in a standalone Application Note, so that I can write phrases about what is included in this 'Var_ThisDoc'.

[kwag_myers]

Just out of curiosity, what's the down side of having two versions of the same paragraph? I've always copied the paragraph to create an alternate version. Or better yet, what's the advantage of riddling a paragraph with conditional tags? Copy, paste, edit, tag. It ain't rocket science.