Comments on: Building a “Conditional Text” Document

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:15:23 +0000

this was one of my absolute favorite things in Framemaker. I was even able to use conditional text as the justification for purchasing it. Now, I haven’t used Framemaker in 12 years, but doing 1200 pages of training materials and being able to keep instructor guides and participant guides in the same file saved me *SO* much time.

By: Tim Kramer

Tim Kramer — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:28:23 +0000

Thanks Harbs that helps my understanding of “Level”.

Thanks Eugene on the ~a wild card to find anchored objects.

I still have issue with the order in which the content flows into the TOC list. Say we have 2 different text frames with 2 different paragraph styles applied on the same page. It is not the order in the “include Paragraph Styles:” but the order is determined by the page geometry of the text frame. Upper left is first.

Wouldn’t the logical way to order the discreet content be in the “Include Paragraph Styles:” list?

By: Eugene

Eugene — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:50:31 +0000

Tim if your images are being included in the list for the TOC and you don’t want them to then create a new style that isn’t in the TOC and apply it to the image by doing a GREP search for

And apply a the new paragraph style.

*You could base this style on the body text style, or whatever you want.

**Note though that ~a will find ANY anchored object, so it would be wise to be careful doing this.

By: Harbs

Harbs — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:42:06 +0000

Levels are important for nested bookmarks in exported pdfs. They also determine the sort order when a TOC is set to sort alphabetically.

By: Tim Kramer

Tim Kramer — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:37:11 +0000

The “Level” spec under Style is a mystery to me. Other than indenting the list of “Include paragraph styles” I don’t see it’s function?

Also when two Paragraph Styles are included the order to which they flow into the TOC is determinded by the page geometry. Not the order that the style is listed in the “Include Paragraph Style:”

And if you inbed a graphic frame into the paragraph the graphic flows into the TOC.

By: Maciej Przepióra

Maciej Przepióra — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:38:52 +0000

Some older versions of InDesign could only grab the first 256 characters of the paragraph, but I believe that changed in CS2 and CS3, which grabs the whole enchilada.

Unfortunately, that is not true with CS2. I remember creating TOC that included lead paragraph (for series of articles) and CS2 was cutting them after 256th character… I don’t know about CS3, because I have created homebrew script that prepared TOC the way I liked it and still use it, instead of ID TOC feature.

By: Mike Meiners

Mike Meiners — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:22:02 +0000

If you plan on using the same design and layout, you can also use Martinho De Gloria’s “Layout Zone” script (previously mentioned on the show), to export a section of the design as it’s own InDesign file.

It’s then a simple act of placing the InDesign file of the section into the various documents. You can then make changes to the section, save, and update links in the design files.

limited to identical layouts, but still an option.

By: Boaz

Boaz — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:16:35 +0000

If you want the “TOC’s” as a separate doc you can create a book containing 2 docs: the original and the “TOC” doc.
This will save you the hidden layer and the overset. (but you’ll have to select the “Include Book Documents”in the TOC dialog box)