Question on conditional text design

[laurie5]

Posted in the wrong forum, re-posting here.

I have a relatively large book (230 pages) with dozens of tables and 100's of graphics. I need 4 versions of this book. One for each grade level (3) and one if content for all 3 grades is sold as a "master course."  Other than implementing the conditional text, the book is ready to go. I have tried a couple different ways to approach the  tables conditionally (some of which are in Text Frames, some just anchored to a page ) but I don't get very far.  Applying the Conditional Text tags ( with different colors and markers for each)seems to make it crash (i.e. almost duplicatable unlike the "normal" 3-4 crashes I experience on a daily basis the last month that are just random). Sidenote: I was very happy to see that they are going to fix the book printing crash...

Cross reference markers are involved in these conditional sections, and I have my suspicions that they are a root culprit of my other crash problems, but then FM crashed when applying conditional text to a section that *didn't* have a x-ref, so I don't know what to think.

I need to get this out by Monday. So my question is this, if I need 4 tables in a page (one for each version) am I better off just making 4 copies of the book and compiling that way? I sold the client on FM mostly because of the ability to compile multiple docs from one base book..so I really hate to have 4 copies when I give her the source. I know you can highlight individual rows in a table for a version (so I could make one really big table for 3 of the versions and just choose different rows), but this is a thing that seems almost certain to make it crash as well.  And the master tables have an additional column as well as a row so I would still need 2 tables per doc if I could get the conditionals to quit crashing. Is there some better way to "design" this that an experienced FMer could suggest? Some custom utility that works even if it isn't free?

Just in case someone asks this:

System Config

FM 11

new install in August, not upgraded

Files are all new and native to FM11

Windows 7-64 bit

20 gig of memory

2 TB drive - local C:/

Thanks for any suggestions on this.

[Bob_Niland]

What you are trying to do is completely stable in FM7. We do it, as long as we avoid things like overlapping conditions (which are theoretically possible to emulate in FM9 & later using Conditional Expressions).

Conditional table row is also stable in FM7.

My guess is that FM11 conditions are not stable.

You could do 4 versions of each table, and just conditionalize the anchor as a workaround.

[Guest]

I concur with Error on this - make 4 versions of each table, conditionalizing the anchor. This is to avoid anything "messy" that FM probably won't be able to handle (causing a crash).

For some reason, FM10 and FM11 seem to just hate conditional tags. I have a much smaller document, and FM10 crashes on me when showing/hiding conditions at the book level; however, I am able to change the show/hide settings at the "chapter" (files within the book) level - go figure.

I'm sure this isn't the answer you want to hear, but I think it's the safest bet and will you save you the headache and time in the long run...

Smitty

[laurie5]

Sigh. You are right, this wasn't what I wanted to hear. But thank you for confirming. 

So I created a new table for one version and applied conditionals. In the "master version" it has 4 colums, so I created a new table based on it with 3 columns. It appropriately shows one table or the other now - but not in the same place. What am I doing wrong that they aren't replacing one another in the same spot? It must be something dumb as I am tired of fighting with FM today.

"master"

kindergarten version

[Guest]

It appears that you forgot to conditionalize the table anchor itself. Put your cursor by the paragraph marker and hit the Home key (I usually hit it a bunch of times to make sure). Then, hold down Shift and use the right arrow key until the entire table is highlighted. Then apply your tag.

Good luck!

Smitty

[laurie5]

Aah, I still know very few of the shortcuts and that was most helpful. Got it, thanks. Now to put the x refs back in and hope it doesn't crash...

[Winfried Reng]

Hi,

I do not agree.

With my files and on my system FrameMaker 8 crashed much more

often when I worked on conditions than FrameMaker 10. (However,

also FrameMaker 8 didn’t crash “often”. Once every 2 to 4 weeks.)

A MIF wash always helped.

Best regards

Winfried

[laurie5 · Accepted solution]

Well, it did crash again this morning when I put the x-refs back into the conditional table. Sent it off to fmerror with steps to dupe.

But about the mif wash. I have been doing it "manually" about once a week now for the last couple of weeks. Can't tell if it is helping, but it is always recommended, so I do it. However, I wondered if someone had a recursive script that would do this automagically...

Thanks,

Laurie

Edit:

Search on mif wash (and variants) and nothing comes up on the Adobe site. I figured it out through a vague reference in an old thread where to find this and thought I would note it for other new users - if there are any...

Book MIF Wash is a utility provided by Adobe that recursively goes through all the files in your book, opens them up, saves them as .mif file then resaves that file back to your .fm file - apparently scrubbing out anything that got hosed in your .fm file. Manually, this process takes forever. And even though you see frequent references to :Have you done a mifwash yet?" when someone has a problem, there is no documentation on this that I have found.

This is a "sample" script that Adobe provides.

Go to wherever you installed FrameMaker and navigate down to the BookMIFWash folder or search for the file BookComponentMIFWash.dll, which in my case was at C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\AdobeFrameMaker11\Samples\ScriptsAndUtilities\BookMIFWash.

Copy the file BookComponentMIFWash.dll to C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\AdobeFrameMaker11\fminit.

Restart the console.

Then you will see that nothing has changed.  😉

You actually have to select the book with your mouse from the Document Window and then the menu item Book Utilities "dynamically" shows up. Under there you will find Book MIF Wash.

I always heed the warning to make sure I have a copy of the entire project before running this. 🙂

Hope this helps someone else.

[IZM]

Can you post the menu path? I copied over the dll and don't see a "Book Utilities" menu after restarting FrameMaker.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

You also have to add the following line to the [APIClients] section of your maker.ini file:

MIFwash=Standard, MIF Wash, fminit\BookComponentMIFWash.dll, all

The menu will only appear when you have a Book file open and selected (i.e. in focus) in FM.

[Links corrected by moderator]