Adobe InDesign - Manual (Page 281)

Number of versions
Number of condition tags required
Organization of content
Tagging strategy
Conditional text hidden
A. “Mac” condition hidden B. Hidden condition symbols
Conditions can be applied only to text. You can make anchored objects conditional, but only by selecting the anchored object marker. You can
apply conditions to text within table cells, but you cannot apply conditions to table cells, columns, or rows. You cannot apply conditions to text in
locked InCopy stories.
Planning conditional documents
When planning a project with conditional text, examine the nature of the material and look at how several people can take turns working with it if
the document is handed off. Plan to treat conditional text consistently to make the document easier to use and maintain. Use the following
guidelines.
Define how many versions your finished project will contain. For example, if you’re creating a manual that describes a
program that runs on both Windows and Mac OS platforms, you might want to produce at least two versions: a Windows version and a Mac OS
version. If you want to produce these versions with editorial comments sprinkled in the text during the review process, you’ll want even more
versions: Mac OS with comments, Mac OS without comments, Windows with comments, and Windows without comments.
For documents with many conditions, you can define condition sets that can be applied to the document for quick versioning.
Decide how many condition tags you need to produce the desired versions. A version of a document is
defined by a unique set of condition tags. For example, a version of a finished Windows manual might be defined by having a Windows condition
tag showing, a Mac OS condition tag hidden, and a Comments condition tag hidden. In this example, you would need to decide whether to use
one condition tag for Windows comments and another for Mac OS comments, or whether to use a single condition tag for both Windows and Mac
OS comments.
Evaluate the extent to which the document can be conditional and how you can organize the material to simplify
development and maintenance. For example, you might be able to organize a book so that conditional text is limited to a few documents. Or you
might choose to keep versions of a particular chapter in separate files rather than in conditional text, and then use a different book file for each
version of the book.
In some instances, such as when working with multiple languages, you may want to create separate layers that you can show or hide rather than
using conditions, with each layer including text from a different language.
Determine the smallest unit of conditional text. For example, if a document will be translated to another language, a whole
sentence should be the smallest amount of text you make conditional. Because word order often changes during translation, using conditional text
for part of a sentence could complicate translation.
Inconsistency in applying conditions to spaces and punctuation can result in extra spacing or misspelled words. Decide whether to make spaces
and punctuation conditional. If conditional text begins or ends with punctuation, make the punctuation conditional too. This makes the text easier to
read when you're viewing more than one version.
To avoid word spacing problems, such as having an unconditional space followed by a conditional space, set standards for handling spaces
following conditional text (either always conditional or always unconditional).
To avoid confusion, decide the order in which conditional text will appear and use this order throughout the document.
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