MadCap Flare: Conditional Text 101

Conditional text is one of those writing tactics technical writers love to talk about… but never seem to use. It’s a shame as conditional tagging can save you a lot of time, especially if you have technical documents which share 90% of the content but the other 10% needs to be tweaked for each release. This is where conditional tagging comes in.

Applying Condition Tags to Online Content

Before we get into it, we should explain a little bit about conditional tags. Here’s an example. Let’s say you have a core product set, but you modify the product name for different clients. Instead of find/replace by hand, you can apply conditional tags that tell Flare:

• If content contains product name 1, apply tag 1
• If content contains product name 2, apply tag 2
• If content contains product name 3, apply tag 3

Why use Conditional tags? Madcap Flare definition: A condition tag is a marker that you can apply to different areas of your content so that some sections show up in some of your outputs but not in others. It is just one of the many single-sourcing features that you can use in Madcap Flare. After you create condition tags, you can apply them to the appropriate content in your project. For example, you can apply condition tags to:

• Topics
• Images
• Stylesheets
• Skins
• Files
• Paragraphs
• Text within paragraphs
• Table rows and columns
• Table of contents (TOC) entries
• Index keyword markers.

Applying Condition Tags to Online Content

How to apply condition tags to text: First:

1. In the Primary Target, click Conditional Text.
2. For each tag, click the Include or Exclude check boxes.

Then:

1. Open the content.
2. Select the text to which you want to apply the condition tag.
3. Select the Home ribbon, Attributes section, Conditions.

If you want to apply a condition tag to selected text in a paragraph:

• In the XML Editor, select the text.
• In the Project Organizer, open the Conditional Text folder and expand the condition tag set.
• Drag the condition tag to the selected text in the XML Editor.

4. For each condition tag you want to apply, click the check box next to the tag.
5. Click OK, then Save.

Checking Conditional Text Settings in the Primary Editor

You can tell Madcap Flare to include or exclude content as follows:

1. Open the Primary Target.
2. Click Conditional Text.
3. For each tag, click the Include or Exclude check boxes.

This tells Madcap to apply these settings to the conditional text. Still doesn’t work? Check that you have the Show / Hide Conditional Indicator button turned on.

This is on the lower right of the XML Editor. When you turn this on, the conditional tags color code should be displayed. Now, rebuild the content – does it work? Hop over to our Facebook Tech Writers page and let us know.