Eric Dunn wrote: > The situation was this: hundreds of components, multiple ways > of writing their descriptions, abbreviations, and > specifications which led to an unmanageable mass of variables. > > So, I turned to cross-references. <snip detailed description> > What are the downsides? Well, so far nothing. But I have an > itch in the back of my skull concerning Xrefs and character > formatting that I just can't shake. Something as to whether > character formatting applied in the source (all character > tagging is done using catalogue formats common to source and > destination) is kept in the destination or not... > > Anyone know what I should be worrying about?
Yeah, potentially char formats, but maybe not. IIRC, there are some formatting characteristics that are preserved in xrefs and some that aren't. I think the basic variants of a font (e.g., bold, italic) are discarded, but significant changes (e.g., Symbol, superscript) are preserved. I'm afraid I don't recall the details -- maybe someone else does? I deliver primarily PDFs, and I wouldn't use xrefs in this way because they'd become working hyperlinks in the PDFs. Ugh! If your deliverables are printed books, of course, this isn't an issue. :-) Richard ------ Richard G. Combs Senior Technical Writer Polycom, Inc. richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom 303-223-5111 ------ rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom 303-777-0436 ------