Problems with Publisher cross-references

[anweid]

Publisher 2.2.1 (Windows) is finally equipped with a cross-referencing tool, which I had eagerly awaited – thanks. Unfortunately, the type of referencing turned out to be unusable for the technical documents I write:

1. In technical documentation, very often all tables and images are numbered, using corresponding prefixes like 'Table' or 'Figure' (see example screenshot).
2. When cross-referencing them, the full text is never used, but just the figure number and its page.
3. The page can very easily and nicely be referenced – wonderful.
4. The number can not be decently referenced, because Publisher always also includes the prefix, which is nearly always unwanted: The only possible referencing I can do now is to start sentence with the reference, like 'Figure 3 on page 4 shows...'. This is because the prefix always begins with a capital letter – references like 'this is shown in figure 3' or 'consult figures 3 and 4' can therefore not be created. Unfortunately, I very seldom want to start a sentence with a reference, but nearly always put it somewhere in the middle or the end of it.
5. If I'm mistaken and there is the possibility to get rid of the prefix in the reference, please tell me how – I couldn't find it.
6. If I'm not mistaken, please add some option to show only the number, without any additional text before or after it – thanks.

Andreas Weidner

[MikeTO]

Hi. It's easy to get just "Figure 6" out of "Figure 6: A short-circuit..." To do this, just insert <ParagraphBody> with End Characters set to include a colon (which it does by default) and deselect Include End Character as shown in this screenshot.

This will result in a cross-reference of "Figure 6". But you're right, it appears there is no way to change "Figure 6" to "figure 6". I thought selecting the field and choosing Text > Capitalization > Lowercase would do it but it doesn't work on a field's value. I think being able to apply capitalization commands to a field's value would be a good improvement suggestion.

How are you numbering your figures? There might be a way to cross-reference it in such a way as to grab just the number so that you can type "figure" as plain text.

Cheers

[walt.farrell]

Most books I've seen would use the capitalized form in the cross-references, basically treating Figure 6 as a name. Same with Table or Illustration.

But if a book's style calls for something different, I think it should be allowed.

38 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I thought selecting the field and choosing Text > Capitalization > Lowercase would do it but it doesn't work on a field's value. I think being able to apply capitalization commands to a field's value would be a good improvement suggestion.

Even if it were possible, you would still need to manually apply the command to each cross-reference. It would be better if the capitalization commands could somehow be applied via a Character Text Style, but currently they can't.

 

[anweid]

4 hours ago, MikeTO said:

How are you numbering your figures?

With the automatic paragraph numbering (see picture) – I'm not aware of any other possibilities. Since numbered paragraphs always begin with the numbering, and the cursor can not be put before this numbering, it is not possible to manually add the word 'Figure ' in the resulting paragraph before the automatic number. Therefore, the word 'Figure ' must be included in the paragraph numbering scheme.

4 hours ago, MikeTO said:

There might be a way to cross-reference it in such a way as to grab just the number

I already tried this, but without success. On the way, I happened to find what I think is a bug in the cross-referencing, which I will report separately later if it still occurs...

3 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Most books I've seen would use the capitalized form in the cross-references

Yes, that would also be possible, but I dislike it, because it looks like a simple typo. Currently impossible constructs with plurals ('see figures 1 and 2' or 'see figures 1-4') would look even worse (like 'see Figure 1 and Figure 2' or 'See Figure 1 to Figure 4'). If Serif would just add the possibility to only cross-reference the automatic number without prefix or suffix, it would leave all options open.
(I myself would also never add the word 'page ' into a cross-reference itself, but only reference its page number and then manually enter 'page ', 'Page ', 'pages ' or whatever is needed in the current context)

Andreas Weidner

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, anweid said:

With the automatic paragraph numbering (see picture) – I'm not aware of any other possibilities. Since numbered paragraphs always begin with the numbering, and the cursor can not be put before this numbering, it is not possible to manually add the word 'Figure ' in the resulting paragraph before the automatic number. Therefore, the word 'Figure ' must be included in the paragraph numbering scheme.

There's often another way to do things in an app with the breadth of Publisher. But I gave it a try and there seems to be a bug in 2.2.1 and the current 2.3 beta so I'll report that separately.

You could number your figures with sidenotes or endnotes and then just not use the notes. Just don't superscript the note references (markers) and you'll have "Figure 6" in your text and the "6" will be an automatically numbered sidenote or endnote. You'd also remove the number from the actual sidenote so it would be invisible, or put the endnotes on a page at the end of the document that you cut out. If your book uses sidenotes, then do it with endnotes, or vice versa.

Cross-references provide a way to include the note number so you could target the paragraph and retrieve the figure number with"<NoteNumber>". That should work, but for me it's returning a # instead of the actual number. I know this used to work during the 2.2 beta because I tested it when I wrote that section of my manual. Once this is working it should do what you want.

A third way you could number your figures is with a numbered list but it provides no advantages over the way you're doing it, you'd still wind up with a capitalized Figure in the cross-reference. You'd set the Bullets and Numbering > Text field to "Figure \#: " (\# is the field for the list item number). This would preface each figure with "Figure 6: " or whatever number it was. You'd also set Restart numbering to "Manual Only", name the list something like "Figures", and click the Global checkbox. Then each time you created a figure you'd just do the same thing. Or easier, you'd just copy the previous figure paragraph and paste it in. Publisher would keep the numbering in sequence across the entire document.

Then you'd cross-reference the paragraph and extract the list number with <ListNumber>". Unlike <NoteNumber>", this is still working in 2.2.1 and 2.3 so I was hopeful this would work for you but I forgot that it would capitalize Figure which isn't want you wanted.

Good luck.

[MikeTO]

Oops, <NoteNumber> is working but I was doing it backward. You have to target the note itself and not the note reference. I'll make an example for you but it's a bit of a hack.

[MikeTO]

Here's an example of targeting <NoteNumber> to produce cross-references with a lowercase "figure 6" format.

figure numbering.afpub

• I made the note references (markers) in the main text non-superscripted. That's easy.
• I have to put something in the note bodies to be able to target them with a cross-reference. Since the numbers could change I have to duplicate part of the title. In this example, I'm targeting Figure 5: Amet so in the note body I wrote "Figure Amet" as a reminder of which was which.
• I didn't want anybody to see the sidenotes so I created a paragraph style with no fill to make them invisible. I also made the note text 1pt tall and 1% wide to make the note bodies really small. I doubt this is necessary for you, figures take up a lot of space, but if you have long sidenotes they can push the main text to the next page. So only do this if you want to do it.

Cheers

[anweid]

Thanks for the sophisticated solution – I'll look into it over the weekend. It definitely gives me a strange déjà-vu: >30 years ago, I had to do very similar contructs to persuade Word for Windows 1.x to do the same job (with so-called auto-numbering fields). The only software that I ever found that could do the non-capital referencing properly out-of-the-box was InDesign. Let's hope that Serif hears my plea...

Andreas Weidner

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, anweid said:

Thanks for the sophisticated solution – I'll look into it over the weekend. It definitely gives me a strange déjà-vu: >30 years ago, I had to do very similar contructs to persuade Word for Windows 1.x to do the same job (with so-called auto-numbering fields). The only software that I ever found that could do the non-capital referencing properly out-of-the-box was InDesign. Let's hope that Serif hears my plea...

Andreas Weidner

I just thought of another solution that is easier but also a bit of a cheat.

1. Type "figure 6" in lowercase, ensure Autocorrect doesn't change it.
2. Select the "f" and using the Typography panel make it all caps. Now it will look like "Figure" but still be "figure".
3. Cross-reference it as you normally would. The cross-reference will appear as "figure".

test.afpub

[anweid]

Over the weekend, I did a bit of fiddling with MikeTO's solutions. They work nicely, but seem to be not flexible enough for the scientific documents I'm used to:

1. The referencing of invisible side notes was a surprise for me – I would never have had the idea to put side notes into pinned frames. It works well, but it seems to only work for one type of numbered object inside the document: Images or tables. I have not found a solution to create two independent counters using side notes, namely one for images and another for tables. My colleagues would even need a third one for equations. But probably I overlooked something...
2. I did not understand the solution that formats the 'f' using all caps – Mike wrote to 'select the f', but I simply can't do that: In the text style dialog, I can select the f in the numbering options, but formatting just the f is not possible there, and in the resulting numbered paragraph, I cannot select any characters from the automatic numbering. But independent of this, it appears that in case I got it to work, now all cross-references would appear in lowercase, which is not what I want. I would like to have the choice how each of the references appears, depending on the surrounding text.
3. If I'm not mistaken, I currently see two solutions for this problem: Either, referencing only the number (without prefixes or postfixes) is made possible by Serif like I proposed above, or self-defined automatic counters are made possible (that's how Word works since 30 years).

As a matter of fact, I now have found a solution that works very well for me, but it's very strange, and I doubt that too many people would want to adopt it. Mike involuntarily put that idea into my head with his last post, and I'll bring it up in my next post in a few minutes...

Andreas Weidner

[anweid]

My very strange solution to get wonderful references uses the possibilities of so-called OpenType features in font files:

1. My figure text style uses automatic numbering starting with 'Figure ', my table numbering starts with 'Table '. In my cross-references, I don't want to see any of these words, but write my own ones.
2. I therefore opened the font that I use for my document's body text in my font editor and equipped it with a new stylistic set 20, which contains the following OpenType instructions:
   feature ss20 {
     sub [F f]' i' g' u' r' e' space' by uni200B;
     sub [T t]' a' b' l' e' space' by uni200B;
   } ss20;
   This effectively replaces the words 'figure ', 'Figure ', 'table ' and 'Table ' by zero-width spaces.
3. I created a new character style that just switches on this stylistic set, and told Publisher to use it as default for my number cross-references.
4. Now the cross-references actually do contain all the default unwanted words 'Figure ' and 'Table ' as usual, but these are automatically made invisible by the font's stylistic set.

This works well for me, but I'm sure that most people would not want to fiddle around with their fonts, so a solution by Serif would be much nicer, of course...

Andreas Weidner

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, anweid said:

I did not understand the solution that formats the 'f' using all caps – Mike wrote to 'select the f', but I simply can't do that

You do that in the caption for the figure, so the f looks like F there. The cross-reference processing will ignore that setting, and just display it as f.

[anweid]

Unfortunately, it's impossible to do that, because selecting any part of the automatic paragraph numbering simply cannot be done: The text cursor just stops directly behind the numbering and simply refuses to go to the 'f'. Selecting the 'f' with the mouse is also prohibited...

Andreas Weidner

[fde101]

Create a character style All Caps which is derived from No Style.  Choose All caps on its Capitals page.

In the paragraph style where your numbering is set up, keep the word "figure" all lowercase in the numbering style definition, then on the Drop Caps page, enable drop caps, set both the height in lines and the characters to 1, and choose All Caps as the style.

[MikeTO]

17 hours ago, anweid said:

but it seems to only work for one type of numbered object inside the document: Images or tables. I have not found a solution to create two independent counters using side notes, namely one for images and another for tables. My colleagues would even need a third one for equations. But probably I overlooked something...

You would do this with multiple global lists. Name the first list images, the second tables, the third equations... You can have as many global lists as you want.

17 hours ago, anweid said:

I did not understand the solution that formats the 'f' using all caps – Mike wrote to 'select the f', but I simply can't do that: In the text style dialog, I can select the f in the numbering options

I meant to select the "f" in "figure" in the body of your document, not in a dialog.

[walt.farrell]

36 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I meant to select the "f" in "figure" in the body of your document, not in a dialog.

As anweid subsequently mentioned, the entire word "Figure" is coming from the Bullets & Numbering specifications, and is thus a kind of field that cannot have the characters selected in the text to apply formatting. The setup is like this:

 

[MikeTO]

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

As anweid subsequently mentioned, the entire word "Figure" is coming from the Bullets & Numbering specifications, and is thus a kind of field that cannot have the characters selected in the text to apply formatting. The setup is like this:

I had suggested the figure trick with a different set of steps, not as a bullet or number prefix. It was for use with cross-references and I provided a sample document showing it.

Too many tips in one thread! 🙂 

 

[fde101]

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

cannot have the characters selected in the text to apply formatting

It doesn't need to be though as its first character can be formatted using the drop caps feature, as I explained above.

Ideally the list would be set up in a paragraph style (one for each of "figure", "image", etc.) so that the whole thing can be automated to that extent.

[Oufti]

2 hours ago, fde101 said:

its first character can be formatted using the drop caps feature

I had the same idea on my side. 

Here is it illustrated:

But it does not resolve the possible plurals (figureS) and other modifications.

 

The idea of a stylistic alternate and zero-width space is brilliant!
However, as the text is always present, it can cause troubles when copy-pasting, especially from a PDF.