Preserve link of cross references when cut-pasted

[Intuos5]

I often have to rearrange my cross references when I use a system like in the vid below this to place my sources alongside my text. For this, sidenotes prove to be insufficient for my needs, see:

However, when I cut the target text and paste it somewhere else (which still includes the anchor, mind you) the reference is lost.

Please add the functionality to preserve the reference link after a cut-paste operation.

 

[Dan C]

Hi @Intuos5,

Thanks for your post!

I've created a test document using Cross-references linked to Paragraphs, Index Marks and Anchors - in all 3 instances when copy and pasting the Cross-reference, the Source and Target were correctly retained for me in Publisher V2 on Windows.

Therefore I believe this may be a bug, potentially caused by your specific document/Cross-reference setup. Are you able to provide a sample .afpub here, so that I can investigate this further?

If possible, a brief breakdown of exactly how you are marking and creating these Cross-references in your file would also help here.

Many thanks in advance

[Intuos5]

Hi @Dan C,

Here's the test document for you to investigate: Cross-reference cut paste.afpub

Description
The screen capture below shows how I created the cross references. 
Essentially, what I do is I add the source (target) text in a separate text frame with a custom baseline for the frame. I add the footnote-source text style to create a numbered list. Then I refer to the text itself by typing the author of the source (i.e. an APA style reference) and set the cross-reference style to Sidenote, which is a non-breaking (though that doesn't work: see: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/192221-non-breaking-character-style-for-cross-references-does-still-break-lines/page/2/#comment-1161052) superscript with square brackets, which uses the numbered list's list number.

There have been several bugs in the document that I am working on, which includes crashes when deleting pages, crashes when applying masterpages to pages that already have content applied, etc. I reported some of those here, but haven't heard back since: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/193325-deleting-~50-pages-in-my-document-consistently-hard-crashes-publisher/
Not sure if the fact that this test document stems from my working document has anything to do with such bugs. Or whether bugs can accumulate in documents from 2.1 beta to 2.2, to 2.2 beta, to 2.3 and 2.3.1?

E: I am on Windows 10.0.19045, Publisher version 2.3.1.

[MikeTO]

You cannot cut and paste an anchor without breaking cross-references to it. When you paste the anchor back in it's a new anchor and not the same one. I don't know that this is necessarily a bug.

However, you can select the text with the anchor and drag and drop it to a new location, including to a different frame, without a new anchor being created, so this might be your workaround. It may be inconvenient if the frame is on a different page.

[Archangel]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

You cannot cut and paste an anchor without breaking cross-references to it. When you paste the anchor back in it's a new anchor and not the same one. I don't know that this is necessarily a bug.

However, you can select the text with the anchor and drag and drop it to a new location, including to a different frame, without a new anchor being created, so this might be your workaround. It may be inconvenient if the frame is on a different page.

Maybe its time to implement a feature that will optionally allow cutting and pasting to keep cross-references attached.

[Intuos5]

Thanks for the drag tip, I'll give ot a try.

FYI I originally posted this as a feature request, but it was moved to bugs @Archangel

[Archangel]

1 hour ago, Intuos5 said:

Thanks for the drag tip, I'll give ot a try.

FYI I originally posted this as a feature request, but it was moved to bugs @Archangel

A new feature request may be required with a link to this thread.

[Intuos5]

10 hours ago, Archangel said:

A new feature request may be required with a link to this thread.

Dan C likely moved it over, so I don't think so.

[Dan C]

Many thanks for providing your file and screen recording for me, that's certainly helpful!

As Mike has mentioned, when copy and pasting the Anchor, the original Anchor is lost and a new one is created, hence the link to the Cross Reference is lost.

I believe this is somewhat of an oversight with how Anchors and Cross References interact - and therefore I'm getting this logged with our development team now as I believe this cross reference should be retained, where possible.

20 hours ago, Intuos5 said:

There have been several bugs in the document that I am working on, which includes crashes when deleting pages, crashes when applying masterpages to pages that already have content applied, etc. I reported some of those here, but haven't heard back since: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/193325-deleting-~50-pages-in-my-document-consistently-hard-crashes-publisher/

I'm sorry to see this - I'm not entirely certain why you have not received a reply to this thread, but I will be sure to bring it to my colleagues attention now and request they respond ASAP with any information available.

20 hours ago, Intuos5 said:

Not sure if the fact that this test document stems from my working document has anything to do with such bugs. Or whether bugs can accumulate in documents from 2.1 beta to 2.2, to 2.2 beta, to 2.3 and 2.3.1?

It's technically possible for bugs to be created/stored within a document itself, but I would say this is rather unlikely and such issues are usually found and resolved by our team before we release any given beta update.
It's much more common for bugs to be application wide with a specific document setup / workflow, rather than the bug itself only being trigged/caused due to the Affinity file contents - but of course this is specific to each individual issue being reported and our team will perform tests in an attempt to conclude how specific the error is to the document and/or app

[Intuos5]

Thanks @Dan C for logging, the information and getting back to the team, it's much appreciated!

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "Editing a TOC heading and updating TOC creates a new anchor incorrectly" (REF: AF-1912) has been fixed by the developers in internal build "2.5.0.2317".
This fix should soon be available as a customer beta and is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.

[MikeTO]

This fix is great news!

[Intuos5]

Definitely, but do note that only 1 out of the 2 tagged bug cases was solved. Curiously, it refers to Table of Contents features.

[MikeTO]

2 minutes ago, Intuos5 said:

Definitely, but do note that only 1 out of the 2 tagged bug cases was solved. Curiously, it refers to Table of Contents features.

The original issue hasn't been fixed, just the TOC issue that came up in the same thread. This TOC issue has been a major issue for people because if you're not aware of it, when you get to exporting you'll find you have many extra PDF bookmarks from all of the edits you made to your headings. It's hard to clean up. But fixing this will help cross-references, too. If you targeted those outdated TOC-generated anchors with the cross-ref feature, cleaning up those redundant anchors would break your cross-refs. So it's just nice to have this bug fixed, even if the original one reported isn't fixed yet.

[Intuos5]

I like that cross-references are getting their final polishing 😄

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "Cut and pasting Anchors creates a new Anchor, breaking Cross References to the original Anchor or Paragraph" (REF: AF-1911) has been fixed by the developers in internal build "2.5.0.2317".
This fix should soon be available as a customer beta and is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.

[MikeTO]

And now both issues have been fixed! This is great.