Cross Refs, Structured FM, and WWP

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Thu, 1 Mar 2007 08:13:55 -0500, "Rick Quatro" <frameexpert at truevine.net> 
wrote:

>One other way to fix this is to use FrameScript or an API client to 
>temporarily convert the cross-references into spot cross-references. This 
>involves inserting a Cross-Ref marker at the source and setting its text to 
>the unique id. Then the cross-reference properties are changed so that the 
>cross-reference points to the marker. WWP will then treat this as an 
>unstructured cross-reference.

Interesting, but I see a practical problem.  You'd need to set the
xref markers for every element in the doc, to be sure of covering
all the potential xref targets.  It's not enough to cover only those
that are referenced within the doc, because then xrefs from other
docs, in the same book or in other books, would still break.  Risky.

Likewise, the change couldn't really be temporary, as you'd never
know when a new xref might be made from another doc.  And for the
same reason, the process would have to run every time you added a
new element, or copied one (resulting in a new ID).

That would add a great many xref markers, which in turn would make
working with the rest of the markers more challenging.  You'd have 
to use Find almost all the time...

>I agree that this is not an ideal situation, but it may be more reasonable 
>than changing your workflow.

Not so sure about that.  Switching between WWP (or ePub) and
Mif2Go doesn't really change workflow.  There's some initial
setup, but thereafter it's essentially the same.  And Mif2Go's
included automation tool, runfm, can simplify it further; the
corresponding WWP tool, AutoMap, costs $20K, IIRC...  ;-)

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/