Duplicating pages creates issues with text anchors in cross-references

[Intuos5]

My cross-references are broken by duplicating pages. What happens is that the text anchors have the same name, therefore, the cross-reference reports the wrong listnumber, even though they refer to the correct paragraph. For example, I had both listnumbers 143 and 146 referring to 141, even though the figure captions they were linked to in the text did list 143 and 146.

Old text:

Quote

Thusfar, I have had no issues with these particular numbers for figures, but now at 143 and 146, the list number is incorrectly reported to be 141. I have tried to reset the text styles in the text box, reapplied the master, refreshed all cross-references, deleted the problematic references and made them from scratch multiple times, but I can't seem to affect the references in question. Not sure whether this is Beta specific, but I am working in 2.5.0.2437, Windows 10.

 

Edited May 16 by Intuos5
Reframed the issue

[walt.farrell]

You're saying that the actual list number (controlled by the paragraph text style) is correct in the document, but cross-references to them show the wrong number?

If so, do the cross-references actually go to the correct spot, or do they go to the incorrect one as implied by the numbers?

Can you provide screenshots so we can be sure we understand what you're seeing?

If you check the Cross-References panel, and edit one of the incorrect ones, what do you see?

[Intuos5]

26 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

You're saying that the actual list number (controlled by the paragraph text style) is correct in the document, but cross-references to them show the wrong number?

Yes indeed. You can see that I select a different piece of text to link to, but it still sticks to "Indoor sport" rather than "General practitioner".

 

I think it may be caused by duplicating the pages. What happened is I removed the text anchor that is created by the cross reference for Figure 141, as a result, the number updated correctly to 143, rather than 141.

 

 

 

[MikeTO]

I'm unable to duplicate this issue. I created a list with hundreds of items and targeted # 160. I edited the cross-ref and targeted # 161 without an issue. I added a new list item before 161 which caused it to become 162 and after updating my cross-refs it was correct again.

I then copied and pasted all of those list numbers and was able to target both the original and duplicate list numbers and get the correction list numbers in the cross-ref.

There must be something different about your document - are you able to share a copy?

[Intuos5]

I have crudely and paintstakingly removed everything except for the problematic text frames (hence the different numbers). It should malfunction as expected, see last page. I added annotation.

Cross references numbering bug.afpub

[MikeTO]

I think the issue is just the anchor names and not the cross-references. Looking at the Anchors panel:

• The first "Indoor Sport" anchor is in the Figure 11 - General Practitioners paragraph - I renamed it to Practitioners to keep it straight
• The second "Indoor Sport" anchor is in the Figure 9 - Libraries paragraph - I renamed it to Libraries to keep it straight
• The "Indoor Sport 2" anchor is in the Figure 7 - Indoor sport venues paragraph so that one is right - I renamed it to Indoor Sport after renaming the duplicates.

Once I renamed these, the cross-references all looked correct and linked to the right paragraphs. They were already linking to the right ones, it's just the anchors that were confusing. Here's the modified file - am I missing anything?

Cross references numbering bug-2.afpub

[Intuos5]

@MikeTO do you have any idea what caused these mismatches between the text and the anchors? I haven't added any manually, so they are created by the cross-reference tool. Does duplicating the page and changing the text in the frame usually cause these issues? Because I never encountered this despite duplicating hundreds of pages in 1.X and 2.X.

P.S. For those wondering how you check the anchor name, right click on the text with the anchor:

[MikeTO]

4 hours ago, Intuos5 said:

@MikeTO do you have any idea what caused these mismatches between the text and the anchors? I haven't added any manually, so they are created by the cross-reference tool. Does duplicating the page and changing the text in the frame usually cause these issues? Because I never encountered this despite duplicating hundreds of pages in 1.X and 2.X.

If you copy/paste text with an anchor named "Apples or duplicate a text frame containing an anchor of that name, the duplicate anchor will be named "Apples 2". If you duplicate a page, the anchor will be named "Apples". I'm unsure why Publisher doesn't append a number to the name, it might have been an oversight.

But if you're duplicating anchors and then changing the associated text, you'll want to change the anchors, too, so you can keep them straight. You don't have to do this though - just delete the anchor after duplicating the page. Ensure you have selected Text > Interactive > Show Anchors and when you change "Indoor Sport" to "General Practitioner", simply press Backspace to delete the duplicate anchor. When you target the General Practitioner text, Publisher will insert a new anchor for you automatically.

You can also avoid this by not duplicating pages - create it fully on the master page and just add new pages based on that master. Or create one page at the end of the document to use as a template and duplicate that page. You could put the "template" page at the end of the document into a non-printing section so it doesn't print or export. Or create the template page in another document and each time you want to add a page like it just use the Document > Add Pages from File command.

Cheers

[Intuos5]

42 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

You can also avoid this by not duplicating pages

I need to make sure my content is exactly aligned, so it's easier to duplicate the page and replace the image frame's content.

That said, next time I'll make sure to delete the anchor beforehand after duplication. I am wondering though under which circumstances you'd eant to duplicate the anchor? To me it seems like it only really creates confusion.

[MikeTO]

47 minutes ago, Intuos5 said:

I need to make sure my content is exactly aligned, so it's easier to duplicate the page and replace the image frame's content.

That said, next time I'll make sure to delete the anchor beforehand after duplication. I am wondering though under which circumstances you'd eant to duplicate the anchor? To me it seems like it only really creates confusion.

Publisher can't remove anchors when duplicating a page because there could be links from the bottom of the page to the top of the page or vice versa. It really should append a number to the end like it does when duplicating text frames or copying and pasting text.

Since this isn't specific to the beta, perhaps this thread could be moved to the v2 bugs or suggestions forum so that could be logged for the future.

Cheers

[Intuos5]

Agreed

[Affinity Info Bot]

An issue raised in this thread ("Duplicating a page does not rename anchors causing issues with cross references") has now been reported to the developers by the testing team (Ref: AF-3163). Thank you very much for reporting this issue to us.

[Sean P]

Thank you both for this. I've replicated the issue and logged it with development.