Conditionnal text and pictures

[PyrosBrother]

Hello,

I will appreciate in future release (v2, 3 or more) to be able to put some conditional text as I do with FrameMaker. I do not use InDesign but It seem to me that it's also possible with ID...

Let me explain if needed : For technical documentations let's imagine we have two similar products. Model A1 and a better one with more functions Model A2. Of course both have some functionality and the A2 one a few more than A1. It would be great to have only one Publisher document with conditional text only displayed (and of course printed) for A2 condition and not for the A1. This is better than having two documents and copy / paste what it's present on both.

Do you plan to integrate such functionality in Publisher in a future release ?

[Old Bruce]

I think you could do it with layers labeled "A-1" and "A-2" and then just switch them on and off as needed. I know this would be a pain but for now it would allow you to have the one document with both.

[fde101]

Yeah, when I was reading this my first thought too was to use layers until I started thinking about this being text.  The text could be in the middle of a test box sandwiched between other text, so this could require that text be re-flowed and could impact the page count of the document, page references, TOC contents, etc...  Layers would not accommodate this and it is a non-trivial request.  Unless the Affinity team has already been secretly working on this behind the scenes I don't think it is realistic to expect this in the first release, though not a bad feature to put on the request list for a future addition.

 

In the meantime I would suggest developing a single manual for both models, including some kind of icon or other marker (colored bar in the margin, etc.) to indicate things that are specific to one model or the other.

[PyrosBrother]

On 10/4/2018 at 3:00 PM, Old Bruce said:

I think you could do it with layers labeled "A-1" and "A-2" and then just switch them on and off as needed. I know this would be a pain but for now it would allow you to have the one document with both.

Thank you for your suggestion but I could not do use layers because sometime the "conditional text" is a whole paragraph inside other ones as fde101 said.

On 10/4/2018 at 3:58 PM, fde101 said:

Yeah, when I was reading this my first thought too was to use layers until I started thinking about this being text.  The text could be in the middle of a test box sandwiched between other text, so this could require that text be re-flowed and could impact the page count of the document, page references, TOC contents, etc...  Layers would not accommodate this and it is a non-trivial request.  Unless the Affinity team has already been secretly working on this behind the scenes I don't think it is realistic to expect this in the first release, though not a bad feature to put on the request list for a future addition.

 

In the meantime I would suggest developing a single manual for both models, including some kind of icon or other marker (colored bar in the margin, etc.) to indicate things that are specific to one model or the other.

I do not think this feature could be present in the first release and my post has for goal to put somewhere in Affinity developer's mind a such feature.

I do not want to do a unique document for both products because I have not only 2 but 3 and this occurs to publish each picture 3 times. Then this will product a to heavy document...

 

[Old Bruce]

4 hours ago, PyrosBrother said:

sometime the "conditional text" is a whole paragraph inside other ones

The only thing I can suggest is to create all the text for the different versions in a text file. Tell the writers to do the same thing three times or however many it is you need (is it yourself doing the writing? If it is yourself then I am sorry to make you work harder to be able to work less).

3 hours ago, PyrosBrother said:

I have not only 2 but 3 and this occurs to publish each picture 3 times. 

We can Embed or Link photographs, sadly the savings in size is extremely small right now. So small ( 0.0002%) it makes no difference but we will see savings in file size soon.