I'm not sure what your use case is... (there's not much in your question
about what you are trying to do) ...so I may be in the wrong postal code
with this suggestion. I'm using mail merge, and I keep all 'conditions'
outside the document itself.

I studied the Opendocument elements and I've decided that conditional text
in LibreOffice Writer is basically a doppleganger from Opendocument 1.0
that made it into the spec, but had no functionality.

So, all text that could be "hidden" now is kept in the database that I use
for the merge (which is a registered Calc spreadsheet).  And I can build my
own if statements there in new titled columns easily.

In Calc:
Column A contains book title
Column J contains number of pages in the work.
Column Z (contains paper thickness imported from a query in the calc
spreadsheet)
Column ZA contains the SpineText with the calculation: (IF(J*Z>.25,A2,"")

While the spine text here is short, I keep the entire back cover copy (up
to 5 paragraphs) in the same database, each paragraph in a separate cell
(for convenience of editing, and to make the resulting LO Writer file more
easily deal with.) I have no conditions on that back cover text but the
same method could also apply to entire paragraphs. Each point where a style
change is required, you'll need a separate cell.

This method is limited to primary text stream, and header and footer text
on each page.  That is, I haven't been able to "merge" into adhoc text
boxes In LibreWriter, only into the primary stream and header footer text.
I have been able to shift the footer text outside the defined box to
anywhere on the page, but that limits to 1 (or 2) out of stream boxes per
page, and the text can't be rotated or shaped.

On Fri, Jan 1, 2021 at 8:56 AM John Kaufmann <[email protected]> wrote:

> WordPerfect has a very useful condition for conditional text that must be
> possible in Writer, but I have not figured out how to implement: How to
> hide a block or section of text (or frame/figure/table/etc) unless one or
> more instances of a class (to which that text pertains) exist. Is there a
> way of expressing the condition
>   "If: a field {IS|IS NOT} BLANK"
> that can be used in the condition to hide or expose relevant text?
>
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