Overcoming Limitations with Find/Change and Conditional Text
For those of you who are power users of conditional text, this post is for you. Have you ever wanted to delete a condition in your document only get to get the following message?
You’ll only get this message when the condition is currently bring applied to text. If the condition isn’t being used, you can delete it without seeing this dialog box.
Let’s say I want to delete a condition called USA. So I do a search for any text with the USA condition applied. And InDesign replies, “Cannot find match,” even though I can clearly see USA is being used.
The reason is that the Find/Change function has a serious limitation in that it will only find text with certain conditions applied if you choose to search for ALL of the conditions applied to the text in question. That’s fine in the rare cases where I know all the conditions applied to the text that I need to find. Notice how if I choose both conditions, InDesign has no problem finding the text.
Keep in mind that this is a very simple example, and I can easily see with my human eyes which text has the USA condition applied to it. But consider how you might successfully conduct the same search if you have a 50-page document, filled with conditional text and anchored objects. Many of my long documents (which use conditional text for equipment configurations, as opposed to currency) contain a dozen or more conditions, and it would be impossible to quickly do a visual scan of the document looking for the correct color of wavy underline.
But it turns out there is an easy way to locate which text has an particular condition applied to it. The solution is to change the change the condition method from Wavy to Highlight.
Now it is easy for me to see which text has the USA condition applied to it. Even though InDesign can’t find the text, human beings can!
I haven’t been aware of this limitation. Have you been able to forward it to Adobe? This is a serious problem. Thanks for finding it. The workaround with highlighting still might pose a problem for longer documents but at least you can get hold of the problem quicker.
I am pretty sure I submitted a bug report awhile back, but I did again today just to be on the safe side.
I’m seeing problems with conditional text, and I’ve learned that it’s best to not use it to toggle text being either visible or invisible. The text is also character styled and XML tagged, so the errors may be due to the complexity and the large document size. I’m careful to never include the pilcrow because doing so always causes problems.