Re: cross-reference between documents

[Tim Altom <taltom -at- IQUEST -dot- NET>]

At 01:06 PM 11/14/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Greetings!
>
>One of our developers asked me (the company Word guru) how to do something,
>and since Word's Master Document doesn't work (--tho' it would be the
>solution--), I'm clueless. He wants to be able to automatically
>cross-reference between separate documents.
>
>For example, in the FuncSpec document, there is this text: "This satisfies
>requirement 2.1.2.1". If the section 2.1.2.1 in the Requirements document
>changes to be 2.2, he wants the reference in the FuncSpec document to
>automatically update: "This satisfies requirement 2.1.2.1". Currently, of
>course, they go in and manually edit: a time-consuming and error-prone
>task.
>
>Does anyone have any suggestions for handling this, in Word or otherwise?
>
Sure, but you may not like it...dump Word and go to something that's
designed for tech doc. Harsh, but true. Anything else is going to be
labor-intensive or a fragile workaround.

FrameMaker (you might have known this was coming) does this very function,
across networks, across documents, anywhere you store part of a book file.
And it updates the whole thing automatically. No sweat, no pain. But not
without cost. Frame costs big bucks, and the training is long and expensive.
And just as difficult can be the paradigm shift it creates in a department,
from a page-by-page approach to a document-centric one.

Tim Altom
Vice President, Simply Written, Inc.
317.899.5882 (voice) 317.899.5987 (fax)
FrameMaker support  ForeHelp support
FrameMaker Conversions
PDF Consulting and Production


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