I begin this thread by noting that there have been several other threads that mentioned this particular error. However, the solutions proposed for working around it are the equivalent of swatting a fly with a baseball bat: just delete the entire XML structure of your document.
This won’t work for me. Why? Because the publishing house for which I work is using ScribeNet to convert from print publications to e-book. Part of the flow for going from an InDesign document to SCML and then ePub/MOBI is to tag each paragraph of the InDesign document with structure tags.
Thus, deleting all of my structure tags would mean I’m back at square one and have to re-do all of the work I have done thus far. I don’t want to do that if I don’t have to.
Now, the problem I’m having is this: somehow one of the images in my InDesign file has two links associated with it in the Links menu. The first link listed has a “< >” where the hyperlink to the page # should be. It also has a caveat in the details of the link stating “Page: XML structure element, not in layout”. Normally, I would assume this means that someone at some point went to the structure menu, right-clicked, hit “new element”, and tagged that element with an href to the image. That would be easy to remedy because I would simply delete that single element of XML structure.
However, there is no such element. I’m the only one working on the file, and I’ve never created a new element. Moreover, there does not appear to be any aberrant XML element anywhere in the structure flow. I wish that the Adobe powers-that-be had had the good sense to add a function to simply break/delete a link since this is a problem I have seen in forum posts going back as far as 2007 and the only solution I’ve ever seen in any of those posts has been simply to delete the entire Story in the Structure menu. However, there is no way to delete the link directly.
When I go to my structure window to delete the “img” tag, all it does is delete the 2nd link which is a normal, healthy link (links to page 5 of my document, not “< >”, and there is no note stating it is an XML structure element that is not in the layout).
I do note that if I delete literally everything under Root in my structure, it does get rid of the weird link. However, it also gets rid of the entire content of the document; like I said, swatting a fly with a baseball bat. Surely there is a way of greater finesse.
I *can* work around this error by simply inserting the link into my document manually by opening up the SCML, repackaging the ePub and MOBI, etc. However, the raison d’etre for a service like ScribeNet is to avoid having to do all of this manually. Thus, if I can’t figure out a work around for this kind of error, I’m going to be doing this by hand an awful lot.
So, since I do not have the luxury of simply deleting the Root in my Structure menu, can anyone else think of a way of deleting a link in the link menu? Or if this is some kind of ‘hidden file’, is there a way to view it? If I could figure out where the data is coming from, I could track it down and delete it. But all I’ve got to go on is “XML structure element, not in layout” and the knowledge that if I delete the entire root, then and only then does the offending link disappear.
Many thanks in advance for any advice you might have.
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