Cross-References

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During the winter term of 2010 two students came along with an extremely voluminous thesis. Though their greatest worry was not so much the main text as their 300 page annex, consisting of many interviews they had conducted. The problem was that they had loads of references in the main text pointing to interview passages in the annex. They decided to print the annex separately a few weeks before the deadline, so as to leave enough time to be able to deal with the references in the text and make sure they got the page numbers of the pointers right. All this work was completely superfluous and could have been avoided using Cross-references.

Pointing to an existing chapter Heading is the easiest kind of Cross-reference. Simply go to Insert › Cross-reference › Cross-references and choose Headings in the left hand column. In the top right-hand column pick out the Chapter Heading you would like to refer to. In the bottom right-hand column you can select whether to refer to the page number the heading is situated on or the number of the heading itself (provided you have activated numbering for headings of course) or even both, then confirm with Insert and Close.

If, however, you want to refer to a specific passage in one of the interviews, you need to Insert › Bookmark somewhere in this passage – appropriately at the beginning – to which you can point to from somewhere else in your text. Give your bookmark a meaningful name (perhaps a good numbering system might come in handy here if you have too many bookmarks). Then go to the place in your text from which you wish to point to this bookmark, Insert › Cross-reference › Bookmarks and choose the one you want to point to from the list in the top right column.

If you have very many bookmarks you might easily loose track of them. So, for one, be very careful to always place them systematically, e.g. at the very beginning of a paragraph. If you want to see a list of all your bookmarks, just View › Navigator › Bookmarks. Double-click on any one of them and your cursor will jump directly to it in the text.

In similar fashion you can point to tables or illustrations, as I have done here, choosing either the number of the illustration or the number of the page it’s on or even both as in: “Please refer to illustration Number on page Page”. For this to work meaningfully you need of course to provide your illustrations and other objects with numbers, which is done quite automatically by simply right-clicking them and choosing Caption. Write a short text, the programme will take care of the correct numbering (so Cross-references will always point to the right object, even if you add or delete other objects in the meantime).




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