5 Replies Latest reply: Oct 15, 2010 7:51 AM by peter at knowhowpro RSS

    Cross references are just unusable

    nick25 Community Member

      As stated in several other discussions (with NO answers), using cross references in a multi-document book is ridiculous. Every single change made in the document cause a slow-down that is just absurd -- it's taking me 10 minutes to change a SINGLE WORD. Does Adobe or anyone else have a solution to this problem? Because without one, you might as well just throw the feature away. Totally useless.

        • 1. Re: Cross references are just unusable
          [Jongware] Community Member

          It helps -- a bit -- if you have each and every document opened in ID.

           

          It's sort of like the Change Page Numbering feature for a book; ID has to open, change, and save each of the documents -- with cross-refs, it has to look up each and every cross-reference. Perhaps they should add a 'don't update right now' checkbox ... or not check them all if the original document was not changed!

          • 2. Re: Cross references are just unusable
            macinbytes Community Member

            Index crossreferences or the junky thing found in the hyperlinks panel?

             

            Indexing isn't bad, but can bloat. I'm in the middle of a job with a huge index. Beats editing by hand.

             

            I think people are under the impression the thing in the hyperlinks panel is usable for anything other than making an excuse to hit the pub are grossly misinformed though.

            • 3. Re: Cross references are just unusable
              peter at knowhowpro Community Member

              nick25 wrote:

               

              As stated in several other discussions (with NO answers), using cross references in a multi-document book is ridiculous. Every single change made in the document cause a slow-down that is just absurd -- it's taking me 10 minutes to change a SINGLE WORD. Does Adobe or anyone else have a solution to this problem? Because without one, you might as well just throw the feature away. Totally useless.

              I suggested a third-party commercial plug-in in this thread: http://forums.adobe.com/message/3208581#3208581

               

              There's also a link to the Adobe feature request page. Add your vote.    

               

              HTH

               

              Regards,

               

              Peter

              _______________________

              Peter Gold

              KnowHow ProServices

              • 4. Re: Cross references are just unusable
                nick25 Community Member

                Sometimes you just have to chuckle. After a relaxing night, I come back to once again face this dopey issue. I open the book, then one of the documents therein. I make ONE a ONE-CHARACTER CHANGE and watch as the document I opened goes out and opens another document in the book, one that it obviously contains cross references to, FIFTEEN TIMES IN A ROW (yes, I counted), probably once for each link in the document. Obviously, I am now going to open that other document FIRST to hopefully speed up the process. But you just have to laugh -- maybe I CAN laugh because it's Friday -- at how a programmer at Adobe can let something as blatantly stupid as this happen in a finished product. Oh, and I bet this is going to make exporting to PDF and any indexing completel impossible, too. Thanks Adobe, for this brilliant "design". Wow.

                • 5. Re: Cross references are just unusable
                  peter at knowhowpro Community Member

                  nick25 wrote:

                   

                  Sometimes you just have to chuckle. After a relaxing night, I come back to once again face this dopey issue. I open the book, then one of the documents therein. I make ONE a ONE-CHARACTER CHANGE and watch as the document I opened goes out and opens another document in the book, one that it obviously contains cross references to, FIFTEEN TIMES IN A ROW (yes, I counted), probably once for each link in the document. Obviously, I am now going to open that other document FIRST to hopefully speed up the process. But you just have to laugh -- maybe I CAN laugh because it's Friday -- at how a programmer at Adobe can let something as blatantly stupid as this happen in a finished product. Oh, and I bet this is going to make exporting to PDF and any indexing completel impossible, too. Thanks Adobe, for this brilliant "design". Wow.

                  Not fun, I agree.

                   

                  Just a wild guess: have you verified that Preferences > File Handling > Links > Check Links Before Opening Document is disabled (unchecked?) I don't know if x-refs are processed by this option, but it's a possibility worth trying. And, if your docs contain many links, it's probably worth disabling whenever it won't affect your work.

                   

                  Other slow-down features I don't think have been mentioned include Preferences > Spelling > Dynamic Spelling, and Preferences > Autocorrect. Disabling both of these may improve text handling.

                   

                   

                  HTH

                   

                  Regards,

                   

                  Peter

                  _______________________

                  Peter Gold

                  KnowHow ProServices