Can I change a cross reference display without having to recreate it?

Question

WHen cross references are to figures on the same page, I let the cross reference point to the paragraph number only ("see View 25"). When it is on another page, I use paragraph number and page ("See View 25 on page 34"). But when my text changes, sometimes text moves, sometimes images move and I need to change the cross reference. It is quite bothersome, I have to rmeove the old one and create a new one, hunting for the cross reference in a list of 150 or so.
Is there a simpler way? E.g. put the insertion point in the cross reference and than some easy way to select a different appearance?

Answer 1

Thanks for stepping in, Jan. I'm glad the smart page-reference building blocks in Cross-References Pro can actually do what I hoped it could, to solve this riddle for the original poster. I did a quick test, just to be sure it worked as I expected, and it does! It would be great for Adobe to license your technology and build this into InDesign, along with the rest of the extra-strength cross-reference abilities. (Disclaimer: I'm not connected to DTP Tools other than being a happy user.)
As to the unwanted space, perhaps a character style in nested and/or GREP style could apply some kind of width adjustment that would reduce the displacement to an absolute minimum.
Regards,
Peter
Peter Gold
Jan Macuch wrote:
Hi, sorry for being a little late on this one. Here's a sample of the Cross-Reference PRO format you're looking for is:
See Figure <paranum/> <pagenum usesectionname="true" forcearabic="true" usepage="true" pagetext="on page #" usethis="true" thistext=" " usenext="true" nexttext="on the next page" useprev="true" prevtext="on the previous page" useopposite="true" oppositetext="on the opposite page"/>
The trick is that you include the words "on" and "on the" in the page wording definitions, but insert just emptu space for the This Page setting. There's a glitch that you end up with an extra space after the reference, but you can replace the normal space by a hair space (code ^| ) which makes it quite tolerable.
Jan Macuch
DTP Tools