WSC’s Free Framemaker Conditional Text Upgrade
Anyone writing significantly complex Framemaker documentation has no doubt struggled with the limitations of Framemaker’s built-in conditional text facilities. Between magenta text coloring of overlapping or multiple conditions, the “or-ing” together of conditions, and the general brittleness of Frame documents with a lot of conditional text,West Street Consulting is now offering an impressive-sounding freeware plugin for Framemaker that should put a lot of that behind us:
- Simplified management of multiple, overlapping conditions
- Whole file conditionalization within a book
- Detailed coloring of single and overlapping conditions as you specify, eliminating the automatic assignment of magenta text
- Natural preservation of conditions through XML and SGML roundtripping, including support for tokenized strings of values
- Storage of an unlimited amount of non-publishable material (such as authoring comments and draft content) in your source files, with a guarantee that it will always be removed before publishing
- Convenience of element boundaries to delimit conditions, rather than error-prone condition tags
- Simplified show/hide process, using “schemes” to program and run the filtering logic (no more Show/Hide box confusion!)
And the best part, from my perspective: An API is provided so that it’s easy to call these functions from FDK clients of your own.
http://www.weststreetconsulting.com/WSC_ABCM.htm
Personally, I want this. Badly. (We have about 20 people who would save weeks of work if they used this and it’s all that’s promised. Wish I had time to integrate it into our work processes!) But it’ll be months before I get to it.
In the meantime, if anyone wants to download this tool now and post a review after testing it, please be in touch! We welcome guest bloggers…
-The Source
