Trouble with cross-references

[White, William]

Hi Framers
I encountered something that sounds very similar to this. I inherited a
years-old project with multiple chapters that had undergone a number of
revisions. Every time I attempted to generate a PDF of the entire Book
the beast would die on me about 3/4 of the way through. 

It turns out that my villainous predecessors were in the habit of
renaming the files at every revision to keep track of the versioning and
the chapter order. (They appear to have never discovered the function of
the Display Heading Text/Show Filename toggle in the Book view - a
surprisingly common bit of ignorance among tyro Framers - so they didn't
know how to tell if the chapters were in the desired order without
hacking the filename to include some indication of the chapter number
AND revision number.) Consequently there were legacy X-refs to headings
in chapters that were still in the book, but which contained the old
filename in their XRef definitions. I presume this happened because my
predecessors didn't use the Rename File function in the book view, but
probably renamed the files outside FM. 

I tried the flush-through-MIF routine which did not solve the problem
since the legacy X-refs were still there. By chance during one of the
failed PDF generation attempts I got a glimpse of the offending legacy
file name, and was able to track the offending X-ref down in the MIF
where I found that the <XRefScrFile> tag contained an ancient file name.
As soon as I deleted that one single nasty <XRef> tag from the MIF
everything worked happily from then on out. 

It would seem to be a doable task for some script-happy person to write
a tool that would parse through a book's MIFs and delete all the <Xref>
tags that contain out-of-date file names. (Obviously the user would have
to supply a listing of legitimate current file names.) I'm a bit
surprised that FM didn't handle some of this cleanup by itself, but
these were SERIOUSLY abused documents so I can't fault the software.

Hope this helps.

Will White

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces+wwhite=onelambda.com at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces+wwhite=onelambda.com at lists.frameusers.com] On
Behalf Of pearlrosenberg at nc.rr.com
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2007 1:06 PM
To: framers at frameUsers.com
Subject: Trouble with cross-references

Hi Framers,

FrameMaker 7.p576
Windows XP Professional

I have a book with 17 chapters. Every time I open the chapters in it,
for six of the chapters I get a message that there are unresolved
cross-references. There are six other chapters with cross-references
that do not generate this message.

Each time, I search for the unresolved cross-references (every cross-
reference in each of these chapters), double-click on each, replace it
with the one in the cross-reference dialog box, and save the file. 
Then I save all the files in the book and save and close the book. The
next time I open the book, the same cross-references are unresolved
again.

I created this book from an earlier version by copying the files from
the old directory to a new one. Then I opened FrameMaker, created a new
book, and added the files to the new book.

Any suggestions on how I can fix this? BTW, when the cross-references
are unresolved, they correctly identify the heads, chapters, page
numbers, and so forth.
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