Conditional Text in Publisher?

[Thomas Geist]

InDesign has the feature of Conditional Text, where pieces of text can be marked and assigned to a "Condition". Turning these "Conditions" on or off will make all assigned text fragments show or hide.

A good description in the InDesign manual is here.

This functionality is extremely helpful for instance in price lists where there are different prices for different markets.
Why not use Layers? Because with Conditional Text all other text besides the conditional versions will stay the same: only one text version to maintain.

I could not (yet) find anything like this in Publisher. Does it have this functionality? Is it considered for the future?

Thanks for any input!

[Callum]

Hi Thomas Geist,

Welcome to the forums

As far as I'm aware there is no feature like this in Affinity Publisher. I will move this thread to the feature requests section.

Thanks

C

[PaoloT]

I use conditional text in InDesign to extract two different versions of a book from the same master. Conditions like "Short Version Only" and "Long Version Only" can help preparing at once both version of a book, intended for different devices (print, screen) or audiences (beginners, advanced, or general public and the press).

I don't know if there would be workaround if this feature was missing, but I doubt there would be any more easy to use that conditional text.

Paolo

 

[fde101]

On 7/16/2019 at 5:24 AM, Thomas Geist said:

Why not use Layers?

Is the idea that the text will reflow when the conditional text is hidden/shown?

In other words, you are not just taking the text and making it invisible (which you could do with a character style) but actually adjusting the rest of the text around it so as to not leave a gap?

 

If so, this would depend on Publisher being able to scale page counts based on frame content - in other words, add and remove pages depending on the amount of content in linked frames - and I don't think it has that capability yet either, so that might be a prerequisite to this one being useful.

 

Also wondering if this could somehow tie into my previously suggested concept of "layer tags" by allowing selected text to be tagged as well, hiding and showing it along with the entire layers that have that tag...  not sure if that idea would work out well in practice.