Showing conditional text, with colours, in output

[phanna]

Hi there,
I would like to have my condition colours visible in my test output. I haven't found a way to do that yet. I can have the text show in the output but not with it's corresponding colour. I realize that I wouldn't want the colours showing in my actual output but it's handy for reviews and testing purposes.

If anyone can help me that would be great!
Many thanks,
Paula

[LTinker68]

The only way I can think of doing this is to create generic classes and set the background color for the generic class to match the color used for the conditional tags. For instance, a generic class of "condPrint" could have a background color of red. You'd then select the appropriate text, apply the condPrint generic class, then apply the print-only condition. When you're ready to build, then you'd just change the background color for the generic classes to match the background color of your topics. However, doing this will leave a lot of span tags in your topics, which may not be much of a consideration since they probably wouldn't be noticeable to the end user, but would make for messy code.

[AprilC]

At my company, when we've sent items for review and needed to let the reviewers know that some items are different based on the conditions, we've done the following:
1. Create Word target with conditional text hidden.
2. Create Word target with conditional text shown.
3. In Word, go to Tools\Compare and Merge Documents to show the text that changed.

Its not quite creating a target with the conditional colors showing, but it's still a way to show the conditions to your reviewers.

[RiverMonster]

Hi Phanna,

I stumbled across a way that sort of works, at least in Flare 4.1. I am not sure if it is officially supported and maybe there is a better way but I will tell you what I know.

In my CSS there is an entry called MadCap|conditionalText. I guess this must have been added automatically by Flare when we started using conditions. If you don't have such an entry in yours I guess it is just a question of adding it in Notepad:

MadCap|conditionalText
{
}

You can use this to set the style for all text that is conditioned (you cannot set individual styles for each condition). In Flare, edit this entry in the stylesheet editor for the medium you want. You can change things such as the text color, background, underline, overline, bold.

Now generate your output. Let's say you set the style to show a green background...any text that has a condition applied to it and is configured to be in the output for the target will now show up with a green background. However, it seems that this only really works properly if part of a paragraph is conditioned but not the entire paragraph. To get it to work properly for a whole paragraph, when applying the condition to the paragraph you first need to add a space at the end and then make sure the condition is not applied to this. I guess if you/the author get used to working like this this could be useful to you, but in its current form it is rather prone to human error (ie. applying conditions to whole paragraphs by mistake).

I am not sure what the purpose of this style actually is (couldn't find anything in the help file) but it looks like it could be that Madcap has taken a first step towards doing what you want. Actually, if this could be fixed/improved so that it works for whole conditioned paragraphs too then it would be useful for us and perhaps more people out there. Our reviewers need to identify text that is only in the print target (not screen) and this would really help them.

Adrian

[SteveS]

Hi Adrian,

Welcome to the forums, nice tip to start with!

[RiverMonster]

Thanks Steve! I have been lurking in the shadows for a while, taking it all in. Great to be part of such an active community.