Profiling and Conditional Text
Profiling text is a way to mark blocks of text meant to appear in some renditions of the document but not in others. Conditional text differs from one variant of the document to another, while unconditional text appear in all document versions. For example, you can mark a section of a document that is to be included in a manual to be designated for expert users and another section for novice users, while unmarked sections are included in all renditions.
Profiling Attributes and Condition Sets
Oxygen XML Author plugin allows you to define values for the profiling attributes and they can be easily managed to filter content in the published output. You can switch between profile sets to see how the edited content looks like before publishing. You can also conditionally profile parts of a document so that certain parts are displayed when certain profiling conditions are set. You can even customize the colors and styling of how the profiling is displayed in Author mode.
You can use profiling and conditional text to help you create documentation for multiple output scenarios, including:
- Multiple outputs for a series of similar products.
- Multiple outputs for various releases of a product.
- Multiple outputs for various audiences.
Example: Profiling Content
Oxygen XML Author plugin includes a preconfigured set of profiling attribute values for some of the most popular document types. These attributes can be redefined to match your specific needs. You can also define your own profiling attributes for each document type (framework).
Apply Profiling to DITA Content
To apply a profiling attribute to DITA content, highlight the content and select Edit Profiling Attributes from the contextual menu. To profile specific elements in a topic or map, right-click inside the element and select Edit Profiling Attributes. The Edit Profiling Attributes dialog box is displayed, allowing you to check each of the profiling tokens that apply for each attribute.
The profiling attributes and their potential values that appear in this dialog box
depend
on what has been configured in Oxygen XML Author plugin. If you have a large list of profiling
attributes, you can use the text filter field to search for attributes or values,
and you
can expand or collapse attributes by using the 
Expand All/
Collapse All buttons to the right of the text filter or the arrow button to
the left of the profiling attribute name.
The attributes and values that appear in the dialog box are determined as follows:
- If your root DITA map references a DITA subject scheme map that defines values for the profiling attributes, those values are used. Oxygen XML Author plugin collects all the profiling values from the subject scheme map that is referenced in the map that is currently opened in the DITA Maps Manager (or set as the root map). In the image above (taken from the Oxygen XML Author plugin documentation project), you see values for eight products. They are the only values that are defined in the subject scheme map and thus, are the only ones that appear in the dialog box.
- Otherwise, a generic default set of profiling attributes and values are available.
Visualizing Profiled Content
You can visualize the effect of profiling content by using the profiling tools in
the
Profiling/Conditional Text drop-down menu that is located on the
DITA Maps Manager toolbar. You can select which profiles to show,
or apply colors to text that is profiled in various ways, as shown in the following
image:
