From the course: InDesign Secrets

312 Create Cross-Refs with a page range - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

312 Create Cross-Refs with a page range

- [Instructor] I love the way InDesign lets you make cross-references, like see page five. But it's not always obvious how to use the cross-references feature to get what you want. For example, you can easily make a cross-reference to a specific page, but how would you make one that goes to a range of pages? Like see pages five through eight. The solution is to make two cross-references that look like one. For example, I want to put a cross-reference right here at the end of this sentence. And this cross-reference is going to point to a whole section of the book, so I'm going to manually type an open parenthesis and then, see pages and then a space and then close parenthesis. Now, I happen to know that this section starts at the beginning of chapter 12, so let's go place that page number in here. To do that, I'm going to go to the Window menu, and then go all the way down to Type & Tables, and then choose Cross-References. Inside my Cross-References panel, I'm going to click the New Cross-Reference button. Now, you probably know that to make the cross-reference, I can choose the paragraph style from the list on the left. In this case, I'm going to scroll down and choose Chapter Title. This shows me a list of all the paragraphs in my document that have that paragraph style applied to them. I'll scroll down here and I'm going to choose weeping trees and their uses. That's chapter 12, that's where my section begins. Now I need to choose a cross-reference format and in fact, none of these work for me because what I want is just the number. No text, just the number, so I'm going to click on this little pencil icon over here. This lets me make my own format. Anne-Marie Concepcion talked about this in more detail in an earlier InDesign Secrets movie so I'll move through this pretty quickly. I'm going to start by clicking Page Number and I'll duplicate it by clicking this little plus sign. Now I'll give a different name and I'm going to call it just the number. You can call it anything you want, really. But what I need to do down here in the definition is remove this text, so now I just have this little pagenum code in there. Now, when I click OK, I want to make sure that that's what listed inside my Format popup menu. Now you'll see, if I move this dialogue box out of the way, you can see that it now says see pages 85. It grabbed the page number from where that paragraph style was, in this case, page 85. Let's go ahead and click OK. Now I want to find the end of that chapter. Now, I don't have a particular paragraph style applied to anything at the end of the chapter, so instead of using a paragraph style, I'm going to use a text anchor. Let's go add one. To do that, I'm going to click this little split screen button down in the lower right corner of the document window, then I'll click anywhere inside this window to make it active. And I'm going to jump to 12. I'll do that by pressing Cmd+j or Ctrl+j on Windows and then go into page 85. I know that's the beginning of the chapter, right? Let's zoom back to fit the page in the window with a Cmd+0 or a Ctrl+0 on Windows. And then let's move this panel out of the way. Now, I'm going to skip from one page to the next using this button at the bottom of the window until I see the end of the chapter. There it is. Now, like I said, there's no particular paragraph style here that I can target with a cross-reference so I need to add a text anchor. And I'll do that by clicking anywhere inside the end of this story and then I'll go to the Window menu, choose Interactive, and then choose Hyperlinks. Inside the Hyperlinks panel menu, in the upper right corner, I can choose New Hyperlink Destination. And this is going to be a Text Anchor type of destination and I'm going to call it end of chapter 12. Once again, you can call it anything you want, then I'll click OK. Now, it doesn't look like anything changed but there is an invisible marker there. So, now I can close my Hyperlinks panel, come back over to this side of the window, let's scroll over just a little bit here so I can see this better, and I'm going to type an em dash, which is what you get if you hold down the Option or the Alt key when you type a hyphen or a dash. You want to use an em dash for ranges of numbers. Now here, I want to make my second cross-reference, so I'm going to go back to my Cross-References panel and click the New Cross-Reference button. Let's move this over a little bit so we can see it better. Now, this time, I'm going to head up to this popup menu at the top, the Link To popup menu. And instead of choosing Paragraph, I'll choose Text Anchor and I can see that this document currently has one text anchor called end of chapter 12. That's the one I just created, right? Once again, I come down here to the Format popup menu and I make sure that I have the format that I just created, the one that gives me just the number, and then I can click OK. So, there's our two cross-references. One for the beginning of the section and one for the end. And of course, the whole reason to go through all this work is that the page numbering may change later, right? So, for example, I'll go ahead and do something crazy like, I'll go to the Layout menu and I'll say Pages, Insert Pages, and I'm going to add six pages after page 20. That'll just add a bunch of blank pages, right? And when I click OK, you can see that immediately all the page numbering updated. It updated down here, but more importantly, it updated in our cross-reference up here. See how it says see pages 91-96? So, sure, it did take me a little extra time to make those cross-references, but in the long run, it's going to save me so much more time.

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