What is conditional text?

Per Wikipedia (correct in this case), "Conditional text is content within a document that is meant to appear in some renditions of the document, but not other renditions."

FrameMaker, and now InDesign, have the ability for the document author to create documents with conditional text.

As an example, let's say you have two similar products, one called Widget X1000 and the other, Widget X2000. Their product manuals might be 90% the same, except for a few added features and specs.

Rather than creating two separate manuals with 90% of the content copied and pasted into the other, it is much more efficient to create one conditional manual that contains all of the content and have the ability to hide the features you want to hide before outputting to PDF for the printer.

Furthermore, if the manual needs to be updated in part of the "unconditional" content, then you only have to update it in one place, rather than each manual. This ensures changes and updates appear completely and consistently in your product manuals.

And finally, by combining and reusing the content of two manuals into one, you are getting significant localization savings. If your two separate manuals are 90% similar, you still end up paying for "repetition", albeit at a very reduced rate. In a conditional manual, you have consolidated the repetitions and they only appear once to the translator.

Important things to consider:

Granularity—Applying the condition to the correct amount of text is critical. In one extreme, you don't want to have two sections of the document each with a different condition but with a lot of the same content. This would defeat the purpose of using conditional text. At the other extreme, you don't want to apply conditions to different words in a single sentence, as that becomes very difficult to manage, and especially difficult if not impossible to translate! The ideal application of conditional text is at the sentence or paragraph level.

Formatting—The formatting of the document must be well-defined enough that if you hide bodies of the text, you don't end up with widows and orphans or largely blank pages. The best way to handle this is to use the "Keep" options of the software to make sure headings stay with their supporting paragraph, bullets in lists stay together, figure captions stay with figures, etc. This is even more important as the document goes through the localization process. The change from English to a different language means text will expand to different pages or areas of the page. The Keep options make sure that when that happens, the correct bodies of text stay together. Avoid using Page Breaks as much as possible, as they can cause pagination problems when text "moves", such as large portions of pages ending up blank.

Spaces—It is easy to forget that a space in a sentence can be conditional. If you aren't careful, you could have some words "butting up" against each other when your conditional text is hidden. Our advice is to use underlining in combination with a color as a conditional indicator and always work in the document with conditional indicators showing. This will allow you to see where the conditional text is, and if a space is conditional it will show an underline, since a space has no color. It is always good to toggle the conditional text and review the document in all versions so you can see if there are formatting issues before final output.

Cross-Refs, TOCs, Numbering—When you show or hide text in the document, anything that refers to a page number or cross-reference will need to be updated again. Use the Update Book function from the Edit menu before final output.