I've created this page as a repository for miscellaneous methods I've devised to solve specific problems over the years.
I hope some of them may be of use to others.
The first article arose from some problems I had using WORD to create cross-links.....
Those of us who use MS Word regularly to author documents which we then need to render to PDF versions for posting online, will no doubt have come across this problem before.
In a nutshell, what’s the best way to generate cross references within your text to figures and other sections of the document such that
a) You can control the text you want to see displayed there and
b) You can ensure that the same text gets transferred properly into the .pdf version when you render it and
c) the links actually work !
Easy, you might think – just insert cross-references. And you’d be right, but therein lies a snag….
The only options WORD will give you when entering a direct cross-reference is to use either a heading, a numbered item, a bookmark, a footnote, an endnote or an equation. You may not want to number all your referenced items; you could refer to a heading, but if you do this, word will only let you insert the full text of the heading, which is often clumsy; a number will probably not mean much to your reader. You’re probably also unlikely to have any of the last 4 items in the list in your document to call on.
To cut a long story short, the best way I’ve found of giving yourself control of what text is displayed at each cross-reference point, and of where WORD will go to in the text when you click the link there, is to use bookmarks in conjunction with cross-references.
How on earth do you do that, I hear you ask ? Read on to find out…..
The first thing you’ll need to do is to set up a list of bookmarks within your document corresponding to the positions you want your cross-references to link to (e.g. Figure Titles):
1) Move your cursor to the first position in the document where you want the link to transfer you to (e.g. Figure 1).
2) Highlight any of the text you want to appear at the link’s position when you generate your cross-reference. This is important as it allows you to have some control over what appears in your text when you add the reference. (If you don’t select any text at this point, you’ll get a cross-reference, but nothing will be added to the text to show your reader where it is.)
3) Now select the ‘Bookmark’ option from the ‘Insert’ Menu.
4) Add a name for your bookmark - NB this name must not contain any spaces or special characters. You can either name the bookmark in a meaningful way to identify it when selecting it as a target for a cross-reference, or just use a simple numbered list e.g bk1, bk2, etc. This name won’t appear at your cross reference point.
5) Click the ‘Add’ button. The new bookmark should now appear in the list. You can now either continue adding new bookmarks or exit the option.
6) To complete the jigsaw, you need to add your cross-references. To do this:
7) Move to the position in your text where you want the first cross-reference to appear. Don’t highlight any text before doing this – if you do it will be replaced by the cross reference text. Now select the ‘Cross-reference’ option from the ‘Insert’ menu.
8) Ensure that ‘Bookmark’ is selected in the right hand box and ‘Bookmark Text’ appears in the left hand box. If it is, you should see a list of the bookmarks you’ve already created
9) Select the appropriate bookmark entry and click the Insert button. WORD should create the cross-reference for you and will insert at that point whatever text you originally selected when you created that Bookmark.
10) You can now continue adding more cross-references or exit the option.
11) One additional item that I find from experience can help visibility in the final document is to change the font colour for the text displayed at the cross-reference points. This will highlight the link positions for your readers. E.g. if you CTRL click Bookmark 1 you should end up at the end of this document…
If you set up cross-references as described above, they, and their associated text, should carry over into the .pdf documents after rendering.
Please note, though, that you cannot edit bookmarks once you’ve creating them. If you wish to change the text associated with them or their position in the document, you need to delete the original bookmark and recreate it. You’ll also need to recreate any cross-references which referred to it. Thus it’s important to select the text you want when originally creating the bookmark.
Please note also that the rendering process may not transfer any font changes you may have made to highlight the cross-references.
Happy Cross-Referencing……