Re: Dealing with autogenerated cross refs--(Tool-specific post)

["DTN 522-6614, OEM Information Products" <lord -at- SSDEVO -dot- ENET -dot- DEC -dot- COM>]

(Post Disclaimer and Flame Defuser:  This post is specific to Word for Windows
as a tech writing tool, and I would've normally posted it on the Word -PC list.
Given that the question originally came up on TECHWR-L, and may be of interest
to many writers using this tool, I'm posting it here.  Go ahead, ignite those
burners...)


On 11/1, K Watkins wrote:

re: cross refs in Word 6.0c:

"For each cross reference between files, I use:
<snip>
-an INCLUDETEXT field in the file where I want the cross reference to appear.
Example:
        ...For installation instructions, see page
        {INCLUDETEXT c:\\docs\\firstfile.doc Install}.
It works smoothly, so long as I include the full pathname in the INCLUDETEXT
field, with double slashes."

>>>>>>>>Actually "K", I'd recommend using only the relative file path (i.e. the
file name only, with no path) unless you _really_ need to specify a specific
disk and subdirectory structure.  If you use the full path name, your document
won't be very portable.

I have a couple of 700-page books I've done in Word using these cross ref
techniques, and I used only the relative path in all instances.  I keep all 30
or so files for each book in the same directory, using filenames that lend
themselves to an orderly structure.

I can move all the files to any other machine or directory without changing
anything in the cross references or the directory structure, and the books build
with no changes.  Also, other writers can contribute to the book from their own
machines, with no portability problems.

Highly recommended, unless your document architecture is so large that the files
absolutely need to be in separate directories.


re: page numbering and cross refs:

>>>>>>>>>I'm in an environment where I am forced by the market to use Word to
publish very large, technical documents (looong story...)  As we all know by
now, Word just isn't optimized for this task.

Given that I was stuck with Word, I made some compromises on certain things in
the book to allow me to efficiently use the tool.  One of the compromises I
decided on was the use of "chapter-page", as opposed to sequential page
numbering.  (There was an exhaustive thread on the advantages and disadvantages
of each about a year ago on this list.)  I prefer sequential numbering from a
user perspective, but it's just too bulky to implement in Word in large,
multichapter docs, as you've discovered.

You wrote, "However, numbering pages by chapter makes it a _lot_ more work to
generate an index:  you have to auto-generate each chapter's index separately,
manually insert the "A-" for every page number in each index, and then sort all
the indexes together."

>>>>>>>>>Unless I misunderstand you, this isn't strictly true.  There's a much
easier way.

We just had a well-known professional indexer (Her first name starts with
"Lori", and last with "Lathrop".  Now there's a shameless commercial plug for
you...) do an embedded index for one of our big books.

After Lori entered all the index tags in our files, we set up an index file with
the same RD field codes we use in the TOC file.  Word uses the RD fields to
search for index tags in all 30-some files and turns out a nicely formatted
index.  Takes all of about 5 minutes for ~700 pages on my 100 Mhz P-box.  And
(shameless use of conjunction to begin a sentence...), Word seems to like the
chapter-page page numbering just fine.  It seems to take any text or field
adjacent to the {PAGE} field as part of the page number, including it in the
index.  The only editing I have to do is to de-bold a few entries that Word
stubbornly wants to stand out.  Give it a try.

Regards,

Bob

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Bob Lord
OEM Information Products                   "A very awed fellow!"
Digital Equipment Corporation
lord -at- ssdevo -dot- enet -dot- dec -dot- com
          office 719.548.6614  fax 719.548.2362
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