Variables vs Cross-references [WAS: Hiding Pages?]

[Rene Stephenson]

Eric,

Nice innovation.

One of the challenges some writing teams face is project portability vs.
linking to shared content on a network. Sometimes variables provide a way
to maintain portability and standards without requiring a live connection
to a LAN architecture. Single-sourcing and using shared content across
multiple documents in a library and among several writers at various
locations can get challenging. Your solution could work for some
situations that come to my mind, though. 

In my experience, you can format a cross-reference by using various
character tags in the cross-reference definition, but any cross-reference
otherwise uses the paragraph formatting of the destination, rather than
the source. For most traditional uses of cross-referencing, this default
works well. Whether you can flip that around by hacking at something, I
don't know...but I usually avoid changing .ini files and the like, if at
all possible.

Rene Stephenson

--- eric.dunn at ca.transport.bombardier.com wrote:

> What are the downsides? Well, so far nothing. But I have an itch in the 
> back of my skull concerning Xrefs and character formatting that I just 
> can't shake. Something as to whether character formatting applied in the
> 
> source (all character tagging is done using catalogue formats common to 
> source and destination) is kept in the destination or not...
> 
> Anyone know what I should be worrying about?
> 
> Eric L. Dunn
> Senior Technical Writer
> 

Rene L. Stephenson
eNovative Solutions, Inc.
Business Phone: 678-513-0051
Email: rinnie1 at yahoo.com