FM72. Tool to quickly makes loads of cross-refs?

[Combs, Richard]

Art Campbell wrote:
 
> The last FM 7.x projects I worked on were perennially losing cross-refs,
> just in day-to-day book building operations.
> 
> Not to mention changes in chapters themselves.
> 
> If it could be truly automated, maybe... but sitting down to a list of
> hundreds of unresolved cross-refs isn't a great way to start your day.

Barring operator error, FM xrefs are pretty nearly bullet-proof. 

I'm not sure what you mean by "day-to-day book building operations," but there are basically only two ways that an FM xref becomes unresolved: 

1) FM can't open the destination file (because it's been moved, deleted, renamed, or can't be opened silently due to missing fonts, etc.) to find the marker that the xref points to. 

2) FM can't find the marker itself (because it's been deleted, the marker text that identifies it was changed, or it's tagged with a condition that's currently hidden). 

If one of these things was happening routinely to hundreds of xrefs, there was something seriously wrong with the process/workflow being used, probably because the person who created it didn't understand how FM xrefs work. 


Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-903-6372
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