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• • April 22, 2024 at 7:30 am #14402701
    Keith Cross

    Member

    I’m hoping someone may know how to bulk-create, batch, automate…cross references. This one-at-a-time business is just painful. I’m hoping to add a cross reference for all instances of a single style. For example, if I add a cross reference, I can search a document by style and add one instance. But I cannot shit-select all of them and add them all at once (which would, I’d hoped, add them in sequence of appearance in the document). Am I missing something? If anyone has advice on how to speed up the process of creating cross references, I’d very much appreciate it. Thank you!

  • April 22, 2024 at 8:21 am #14402702
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    I’m not sure of all the features, but you might want to look at Cross References PRO from DTP Tools (part of their DTP Cloud offering)
    https://dtptools.com/product.asp?id=crin

  • April 22, 2024 at 8:28 am #14402703
    Keith Cross

    Member

    Thank you. Am I the only one shaking my fists at the Indesign skies? Why…why must cross references be so archaic?

  • April 22, 2024 at 8:51 am #14402704
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Well, you can always go to indesign.uservoice.com to request or vote on feature requests. But I think the answer here is: probably only a small percentage of InDesign users use x-refs… and of that number, only a small percent need advanced or better features… and so third-party developers have stepped in to solve the problem.

  • April 22, 2024 at 9:42 am #14402705
    Nick B

    Participant

    Hi Keith

    Am I right in thinking that you essentially want to create your list of destination reference points in the cross-reference panel all at once via the paragraph style selector then, as you work on your document, insert a reference by selecting it from the cross-reference list? Or use the paragraph style selector to create all references and then have something like a loaded cursor to place them? I wasn’t sure what you meant by “add them in sequence of appearance”.

    Creating the list of references is very manual and quite tedious as you say, but when you create the cross reference you also determine any automatic text (e.g. “section “[x-ref chapter no.]” on page “[x-ref page]) as well as being able to apply format (character style), and that might vary, though it sounds like perhaps not in your case.

    I use various styles of cross-references in our books and haven’t looked at any scripts or plug-ins, but despite the manual nature I do like the flexibility of output that it allows.

    I agree with David though, if you can think of how the feature could work better then provide the feedback to Adobe. I often feel that Indesign development has stagnated, and while I don’t want new features for the sake of them, ideas for workflow improvement from real users are important.

    Nick

  • April 22, 2024 at 7:37 pm #14402732
    Keith Cross

    Member

    I think I’m looking for this one: “…use the paragraph style selector to create all references and then have something like a loaded cursor to place them?” because I’m essentially using the cross references like an Appendix. It occurs to me that perhaps I should treat this as an Index, but I’ve never made one in InDesign and I’m not sure if that will give me the output I want.

  • April 23, 2024 at 1:27 am #14402745
    Nick B

    Participant

    The ‘reference to’ parts of the cross-reference are normally interspersed throughout the document, but if you are wanting something more akin to an index, i.e. a list of the references, then would a table of contents work for that? It works exactly on the premise of selecting a paragraph style or styles and compiling all cases into a list, i.e. it’s a lot more flexible than just an actual table of contents.

  • May 2, 2024 at 9:39 am #14402928
    Keith Cross

    Member

    Yes, I understand how normal cross references operate. The cross reference list was preferable because I had a way to update it if, by chance, I had to bump an entry to a new page manually, and my book re-paginates. Indexes and TOCs are more of a “final step”, if you will. Xrefs are more dynamic, like hyperlinks. But Xrefs are buggy, bandwidth hogs, and the document I’d created to handle them in my book keeps crashing.

    The TOC or Index method was not ideal, but Indexing seems to be the least difficult route. I also found this: https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/index_from_wordlist.html (a script that makes index entries from a paragraph style). The issues I’m facing is that the directory I have is organized by geographic region whereas the Appendix is meant to be organized by service category. Thus far, my solution has been:

    1. Create the index entry per the style (using the script, thank you Mr. Kahrel)
    2. Copy/paste the index (which has each item with page number) into a spreadsheet and sort/manipulate/resort entries to pair the relevant entries (by title) with the relevant index reference (with page numbers)
    3. Then recompile the entries by service category (which do not have/don’t need a link)
    4. Re-import the text to serve as the index (now “dumb” because the index markers are eliminated)

    If only I could search and replace, using GREP, all page numbers, e.g., find “123”, replace with “^I123^I” but thus far, it appears that it just gives me text (not a linked page marker), e.g., “^I123^I” that isn’t a link. ((and oddly enough, when I perform the S/R, I cannot undo it. It just leaves the markers as text (they are definitely not hidden text).))

    I have not found a way to export the index (with the code associated with each page marker) and do a search and replace outside of InDesign, then import back in.

    At present, I may have to just accept that the index will not have links to the page, but merely serve as an indication of the page to the reader of the PDF. The printed version is sufficiently served by this option, of course, but the PDF would not have links. I’m also hoping to investigate this: https://www.id-extras.com/products/liveindex/. Maybe it will be my last step to relink things?

    I appreciatively welcome any other insights.

    Regards, KC

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