Export and cross-refs

[DylanMuir]

Hi,

I'm having a problem when trying to export a mellel document to rtf, plain text or word format. In all cases, cross references aren't exported with the text which appears in mellel (which is what I'd expected). In RTF and Word format, they are replaced with " ? ". In plain text, they become an indecipherable string of unicode.

In Word, they become an active field: {PAGEREF something}. However, the figure captions (which were the target of these cross references) have no corresponding field identity.

In any case, I would expect that plain text export should just dump a plain text representation of whatever is in the document.

Has anyone else had this problem? Is it a known bug?

Thanks,
DRM

[mi.cy]

Hi DRM,

I noted this shortly after the beta-test period of 2.5, and contacted Ori about it. He replied that it is known behaviour, because the detailed cross-references structure of Mellel cannot be mapped onto the much simpler structure of Word/RTF. Further, the only kind of cross-references that are interesting to keep after an export to Word/RTF are the page numbers, because they are subject to change, depending on the page-layout. So that is why they decided to export all cross-references as page numbers.

However, the current behaviour is completely useless, because, as you note, *all* cross-references are changed to page numbers. I suggested to Ori to add an option in the export-process to keep the page numbers 'live', but simply change all other cross-references to 'dead' links, only retaining the text as shown in Mellel. He answered that this is a good idea, but unfortunately it didn't (yet) materialize in an updated version.

This (wrong) behaviour is a deal-breaker for me. Practically every document I write in Mellel has to be exported to another format before it can go to a publisher. Because I cannot export my cross-references, I stopped using them completely!!! So, while the corss-reference system in Mellel is fabulous (pace some other minor quibbles I have with it), it is currently useless for me. There does not even seem to be a work-around like a find-replace which turns all cross-references into plain text inside Mellel.

(im)patiently waiting for an update,
michael

[signinstranger]

the detailed cross-references structure of Mellel cannot be mapped onto the much simpler structure of Word/RTF.

What I don't understand is why Mellel does not simply resolve the references that are impossible to translate into RTF syntax? Mellel could export them verbatim as formatted or plain text.

[aechallu]

I proposed this as well: solve x-refs and export them as regular text rather than live references.
As they work now, cross-references to me are glorified markers: I have to go one by one and change them back to text. But I hope decent RTF support is on the way.

[gpolberd]

Of course, a simple possible solution to this is saving your files in PDF format. All cross-references come across just fine in PDF.

[mi.cy]

PDF won't be of help with publishers: they need the real text...

[daiyi]

PDF won't be of help with publishers: they need the real text...

Redlers should have "publisher's license," discounted so that even smaller houses would be willing to purchase a copy (if they use Apple computers, of course).