Getting Productive with XMLMind
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Cross-references

Cross-references are also pretty easy once you get the hang of things. An easy way to get started is to just put xxx in your text as you're typing and come back to replace that chunk with a real reference after you've added the table/figure/section/etc.

To place the actual cross-reference link, delete the xxx and place your cursor where you want the xref/link to go.

Click the Insert button (the middle one in the section highlighted by bullet 3 back in Figure 1) and pick the xref element from the list of available elements in the Edit tool. (Typing X is a fast way to jump to it.)

Supply the linkend attribute value as shown here:

• The xref you just inserted should start out selected. If you need to (because you've done something else and are coming back to this task), select it.
• Click the linkend attribute in the Attributes tool (bullet 1).
• Pull up a list of existing ids by clicking the List of Values button in the second row of the tool (bullet 2).
• Select the desired id from the dialog that pops up (bullet 3).
• Also be sure to set the xrefstyle attribute to something appropriate (bullet 4). For printed material, the usual value is select: label which generates something like Figure 3. For an online article like this without numbered sections, we've been using select: quotedtitle to generate section cross-references. You can see a whole bunch of other options in the excellent Sagehill book available online.

You can also embed hyperlinks to other documents out on the web, obviously, as we just did in the last bullet above. To do this, select the text you want to turn into a link, then wrap it in a ulink element using the link menu:

Set the url attribute of the ulink using the Attributes tool:

The link will be live in a generated HTML version of the document, and will display the URL in a printed version. The DocBook stylesheets are smart enough not to produce a redundant copy of the link if you used the URL itself as the text. Otherwise the URL will either be displayed in brackets after the text of the link, or set as a footnote, at the discretion of the stylesheet author/user. In PDF versions, the link will display the URL for printing, but will also be live when you're viewing the PDF on a computer.