Moving cross-reference destinations among documents in a book

[rogerc91033698]

We produce a catalog consisting of hundreds of two-page spreads, each in its own document. We have assembled these spreads into a book for indexing, and this is working well. We are now considering replacing "see page XXX"-type references that occur in the copy with inDesign cross-references (Text Anchors, page number only), but we are concerned that, if the destination moves to another page/document, the cross-reference will be broken. Will the "update book" process be able to resolve the new document location of these cross-reference destinations? Each Text Anchor is uniquely named WRT the entire book. I have looked through the forums, and maybe this has been answered, but I have not found much info about this. Thanks.

[Kasyan Servetsky · Accepted solution]

No, updating the book won't solve this.

I had a similar situation a few years ago. Hyperlinks (BTW cross-references is just a variety of hyperlinks from the scripting point of view) were created in a single file which was later split into dozens of separate files (articles for a folio project). After cutting and pasting text to another doc, the hyperlinks obviously stopped working.

This can be solved by a script. I did it like so:

1. Create new (or rename existing) hyperlinks so that each hyperlink (both the hyperlink and corresponding destination -- anchor) would have a unique name. For example, I used something like this:

BookName0123456789

A prefix unique for each book + a sequential number generated by script

2. After moving the text to another document, the script restores broken hyperlinks looping through all hyperlinks, and looking for every broken hyperlink the anchor with the same name. If found -- fix it.

— Kas