Issue 2204 - Cross references enhancements
Summary: Cross references enhancements
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE of issue 25072
Alias: None
Product: Writer
Classification: Application
Component: ui (show other issues)
Version: 638
Hardware: All All
: P1 (highest) Trivial with 17 votes (vote)
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: bettina.haberer
QA Contact: issues@sw
URL:
Keywords:
: 13994 19515 20661 21062 22372 (view as issue list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2001-11-14 17:55 UTC by henrikjust
Modified: 2004-12-09 08:15 UTC (History)
8 users (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT
Latest Confirmation in: ---
Developer Difficulty: ---


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Description henrikjust 2001-11-14 17:55:18 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.
Comment 1 stefan.baltzer 2001-11-19 18:07:03 UTC
Reassigned to Falko.
Comment 2 falko.tesch 2002-01-02 10:40:51 UTC
This issue is re-assigned to Christian Jansen for further evaluation.
Comment 3 christian.jansen 2002-01-03 15:56:49 UTC
Seems to be very interesting. Will be evaluted in depth. Stay tuned.
Comment 4 quetschke 2003-04-17 08:07:58 UTC
Ping! When?

Is this question allowed after 1 year?
Comment 5 christian.jansen 2003-06-02 07:46:43 UTC
Reassigned to Bettina.
Comment 6 guido.pinkernell 2004-01-19 16:26:23 UTC
*** Issue 13994 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Comment 7 rblackeagle 2004-01-20 01:59:47 UTC
I wish it would get fixed.  I write books and this is a really irritating lack
in OOo.
Comment 8 guido.pinkernell 2004-01-31 18:50:32 UTC
*** Issue 21062 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Comment 9 guido.pinkernell 2004-01-31 18:52:44 UTC
*** Issue 20661 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Comment 10 pilotsguide 2004-02-01 21:25:11 UTC
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.
Comment 11 guzzi333 2004-02-01 21:50:16 UTC
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.
Comment 12 guido.pinkernell 2004-02-08 11:37:18 UTC
*** Issue 19515 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Comment 13 guido.pinkernell 2004-02-08 12:19:02 UTC
*** Issue 22372 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Comment 14 caz99 2004-02-09 06:05:33 UTC
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!!!!!
Comment 15 nicolo 2004-02-09 08:00:17 UTC
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.
Comment 16 mendrix 2004-02-19 20:34:19 UTC
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...  :-)
Comment 17 iannz 2004-03-16 20:33:31 UTC
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
Comment 18 bulbul 2004-03-28 04:56:14 UTC
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.)
Comment 19 g.marxen 2004-03-29 14:14:58 UTC
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
Comment 20 bulbul 2004-03-29 15:16:50 UTC
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.)
Comment 21 g.marxen 2004-03-29 15:44:04 UTC
Yes, in general, referencing to paragraphs formatted with a certain paragraph
style like "example" oder "heading 1" would be a great enhancement. 
G. Marxen
Comment 22 frank.loehmann 2004-05-06 10:03:41 UTC
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 ***
Comment 23 Martin Hollmichel 2004-10-15 04:11:21 UTC
close issue.
Comment 24 andreschnabel 2004-12-09 08:15:56 UTC
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.