Bookmarks & cross-reference text

[roblgs]

Hi,

I've been converting over some old Nisus Classic documents that contain cross-referencing to a list of referenced papers at the end.

Typically, where there is a long list of authors I would want the cross-reference text in the body of the document to read something like "J. Smith et al, 1997", but for the item in the references list at the end to give the full list of authors names.

In Classic I was able to do this, albeit in clumsy fashion, but setting a label that read "J. Smith et al, 1997" with an "invisible" style so that it didn't print. For example, the entry in the reference list might look like this:

J. Smith, F. Bloggs, H. Potter & W. Jones; "Some title or other", International Journal of Stuff, V10, N11, 1997 [J. Smith et al, 1997]

The bit in the square brackets is the label and it (including the braces) would be non-printing. The text between the braces would be selected as the bookmark for this item, and then displayed in the body of the document as the cross-reference text.

I could do the same by labelling each item in the reference list at the end of the document in NWP, but I don't see a means of making the label non-printable in the styling options, so it appears messy (and unnecessary) in the reference list.

What would be helpful would be either

1) Some styling option to set a run of text as being non-printable as per the old 'invisible' styling option in NWClassic, or

2) The ability to specify the Bookmark name as the display text in a cross-reference, or

3) Allow creating a custom label attached to the bookmark so that it is never part of the actual visible document, and then using that custom label as the visible text for the cross-reference.

Hope that makes sense. Of course, if anyone has a solution that would allow this in current NWP, I'd be delighted to learn of it.

Cheers


Rob

[martin]

Offhand I can't think of a similar strategy that works for NWP, as we don't have invisible text.

One alternative way you might go about the same thing: define a custom document property using the menu File > Properties. You can call this custom property whatever you like, just set its value to "J. Smith et al, 1997". Then you can insert automatic text for that value using the menu Insert > Document Property > Custom Property > your property. I don't know if this would be convenient for you, but it's the only thing that came to my mind.

[roblgs]

Thanks, I think I can get that to work.

It's not so intuitive, but then neither was my original solution.

The more I think about it the more I like the notion of being able to use the name of the bookmark as the cross-reference text... or to give the bookmark an optional 'label' attribute that could similarly be used as cross-reference text. Might be a useful extension to bookmarks.

Rob

[martin]

The more I think about it the more I like the notion of being able to use the name of the bookmark as the cross-reference text... or to give the bookmark an optional 'label' attribute that could similarly be used as cross-reference text. Might be a useful extension to bookmarks.

I'll file this as a feature request, thanks Rob.