How to style DITA xref

[GreatBigBore]

Seems like it should be simple and straightforward, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to style my xrefs. Customer wants them to display as underline and bold. I thought I could just go change one small setting in some style sheet, but I can't find anything that resembles a style sheet. The EDD file shows that under this or that circumstance the link.external or link.asis character format should be used, but I can't seem to find where link.external and link.asis are defined. I found one document that seems to address the issue, but it has a really long and laborious process for applying styles. Surely it's not so hard? Where in the world do I set display styles for xrefs?

[ohnehosen]

I think you need to define this in your output template. Open the output template and bring up the cross-references panel menu. Select the xref format that you want to change in the "Format" pulldown menu, and then click the "Edit Format..." button.

All of the character formats in the output template's format catalog are included in the building blocks for the xref format, so it looks like you choose your character format for the xref there.

Edit to add: You can add or edit a character format tag to suit your client's needs, if you don't already have one.

All this is assuming you're using the xref formats included by default. I think it gets convoluted when you want to add new xref formats.

I hope this helps!