Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 2204
Cross references enhancements
Last modified: 2004-12-09 08:15:56 UTC
This proposal came out of the "make OOo lawyer-friendly" thread in the discuss list: Cross referencing in Writer needs some extensions: Writer supports five kinds of automatic numbering: - footnote numbers - endnote numbers - sequence numbers - outline numbering (numbered headings) - numbered lists (and also line numbering, which I don't consider relevant here). It is easy to insert references to footnotes, endnotes and sequence numbers, since the field dialog displays a list of all footnotes, all endnotes resp. all sequence numbers (of each type) to choose from. References to headings currently requires a manually defined reference mark or bookmark, which can become very cumbersome if you have a lot of references. References to numbered list items is currently impossible! I propose to treat numbered headings and numbered list items like the other automatic numberings: In the Field Dialog the listbox "Type" should have two additional entries "Headings" and "Lists". When "Headings" is selected, the listbox "Selection" should present a list of all the headings in the document. When "Lists" is selected, the listbox "Selection" should present a list of the first paragraph of all numbered list items in the document. It would be optimal if the headings and lists were presented in a tree view, but a simple "flat" list would be OK. (This will of course require, that each heading and numbered list item is assigned a unique ID internally.) These extensions would make the cross referencing mechanism more consistent (all automatic numberings are treated the same way), easier to use (you don't have to create as many reference marks/bookmarks manually) and add the missing "refer to item in numbered list" feature.
Reassigned to Falko.
This issue is re-assigned to Christian Jansen for further evaluation.
Seems to be very interesting. Will be evaluted in depth. Stay tuned.
Ping! When? Is this question allowed after 1 year?
Reassigned to Bettina.
*** Issue 13994 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
I wish it would get fixed. I write books and this is a really irritating lack in OOo.
*** Issue 21062 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
*** Issue 20661 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
As mentioned in issue 20661 (a duplicate of this issue) IMHO the ability to drag a reference from the Navigator window is an excellent idea.It is already working with hyperlinks, but unfortunately they don't update in the same way as cross-references as it is the "name" not the target that is inserted.
Anyone knows how we get this into the next release of OO? I really hope this gets in, because it's by far the largest problem I have in OO.
*** Issue 19515 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
*** Issue 22372 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
I totally agree! We work on medium sized technical documents (not legal) here, I really cannot imagine manually doing bookmarks for cross references. I think it is mis-representing saying it is to make it "laywer friendly", ask anyone doing techncial documents and they will want this too! I'm just going to have to give up proper cross referencing - which will make documents much less easy to read. The "control-click" to follow the link in word is perfect for reading documents! I think OpenOffice Writer is seriously impeding its acceptance right now unless this issue is addressed. I'm not sure how the votes work, there may be only 4 votes but really - any user doing documents larger than 5-10 pages is GOING to NEED this. Please add it!!!!!
I really would like to confirm caz99's comment! I use Writer at work (tecnical documents and correspondence too) and i like this software much. But cross-referencing generally isn't implemented well. I think almost everybody how writes more than letters could consider to use cross- references. So it's an important feature within a reliably Word-processing software. Why is this future not implemented well with Writer? For example you want to insert a reference to a table (the same with an illustration). You select Insert.. cross-reference: the dialog shows you a list of table with the numbering, e.g. 'Table 3.1', 'Table 3.2'. It would be a lot more helpful if this dialog would show number and caption of the tables! Therefore developers, if you implement automatical cross-reference setting to HEADING's so *please* mind this: it's much more helpful, if the list within the cross-reference dialog shows '1.2 Purposes' instead of 'heading 1.2'! If you need an exemple what i mean, so please take a look at MS Word. I propose to set a higher priority to this issue.
When writing manuals for software, you simply need fast and easy auto-updating crossreferences by outline number, or even with text of the outline heading. It is a TERRIBLE WASTE OF TIME doing 1000+ cross references with unnecessary manual steps with OpenOffice right now in a manual of 300 pages. Nevertheless OO is a great product with great developers, I just really miss this feature. Its even more frustrating that all the elements of good cross-references are there, they are just quite useless put together... :-)
At the risk of being another me too posting, I found the lack of easily cross referencing headings annoying so have written a macro to do the job. It is downloadable from: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/hillview/OOo/ It works and I thinks works well, but could do with a number of enhancements, which I intend to do before posting it to http://ooomacros.org/. For large documents on a slow machine setting-up the dialog is a bit slow. It only works with outline styles (I.e. Headings1 to 10 by default) so for handling bulleted or numbered lists a work around would be to use say level 10 as the style of the paragraph before or for the paragraph of the first item of such lists. I would really appreciate anyfeedback on it. In the longer term I agree that the better option would be to be able to choose a drag type of reference and to be able to set-up what form that reference would take and to drag from the navigator. In the mean time I hope that this helps and really would appreciate some feed back. Ian Laurenson
I would like to add that it is not always possible to use outline numbering as a workaround for list item numbers, this is because list item numbers are incremented regularly across arbitrary outline numbers. I am currently writing a linguistics paper. In our field is it customary to use many examples which are numbered consecutively from 1 at the start of the paper to n at the end of the paper. It is important not to reset the example number to 1 each time we hit a new section, subsection, or subsubsection, because it would become very clumsy to refer to them. (And it would really annoy the audience if i did that on a handout!) The only way for me to write this paper is for me to use outline numbering for my numbered examples and to refrain from using it for the outline. That is, i have to number all of my sections manually. It would have been virtually impossible to write my dissertation in OOo. And for this reason, i cannot recommend OOo over Word to my colleagues. (I, myself, use Latex.)
Last Comment by bulbul is not correct! I refer to the mentioned "examples". You can number all your examples by using a "numbering style" (Nummerierungsvorlage) in a paragraph style. If needed, you create one in the stylist, f.e. "numbering-examples" by defining the appropriate numbering attributes and use it in the paragraph style, f.e. example. Each time you make a new example, you format it with the para. style example. If the example consists of more than 1 paragraph, you can format following paragraphs with another style to avoid a new number. G. Marxen
Sorry. I did not make clear that i need to *refer* to the example numbers in the text, which is currently not possible, even using a numbering style. I need the ability to do something like this: Section 5 In explicit subject clauses, the verb must appear in its short form: (43) a. Kucule uSipho. b. *Kuculile uSipho. .... Section 8 When the verb agrees with an immediate following subject, it must appear in its long form: (97) a. Uculile uSipho. b. *Ucule uSipho. As was shown in example (43) above, expletive subject clauses require the verb to appear in its short form. In Section 8, i referred back to an example in Section 5. There is currently no way to do this, because OOo doesn't yet allow for referring to the paragraph number of a numbered paragraph. This fact is described in issue 20661, which has been duped to this bug. So, currently there's no way to have a paragraph with the right numbering properties and the ability to refer to them. The numbering properties are only present in the numbered paragraph, but the ability to refer is only available for outline numbering. (If there *is* some way to do this, please let me know.)
Yes, in general, referencing to paragraphs formatted with a certain paragraph style like "example" oder "heading 1" would be a great enhancement. G. Marxen
I have set this one to be a duplicate to 25072, because we are already working on this issue using that newer bug id. Please find the specification regarding this issue here: http://specs.openoffice.org/writer/numbering/Direct_Cross_References_to_Headings_and_Numberings.sxw I will also add a comment to 25072 that votes and comments will taken into account. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 25072 ***
close issue.
to all who have voted for this issue: please move your votes over to Issue 25072. Although there is a noitce in Issue 25072 about existing votes, this will not be visible in any statistic query.