How to Identify Missing or Incorrect Cross-References in a Manual Index

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
August 28, 2024
2 replies
4273 views

I am currently working on manually indexing over 6,000 entries in a book that contains countless cross-references within the index. Since I'm doing this chronologically and many of the referenced entries don't exist yet, I have to manually type or paste the cross-reference entry. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that the editor who provided me with the file (a PDF with comments) occasionally made typos or omitted parts of the entry names.

Is there a way to identify cross-references in the index where the corresponding entry doesn't exist?

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Peter Kahrel

Community Expert

> Is there a way to identify cross-references in the index where the corresponding entry doesn't exist?

Not sure I understand this. It's not possible to have a cross-reference to a non-existing topic: when you create a cross-reference for a new topic, the referenced topic is created automatically.

B

bine_roAuthor

Participating Frequently

The topic is generated, but not a reference, since there needs to be an index marker for that. If I create an index and a cross-reference points to an incorrect or missing reference, it will be displayed as though the reference exists. The only way to verify this seems to be by manually checking each entry. And that is very time consuming, prone to error and since this index has throusands of entries, it's not really manageable.

What I probably need is a way to list the index entries with cross-references to unused topics?

I’ve attached an image to illustrate what I mean.

Peter Kahrel

Community Expert

That means that the cross-references are part of the topic names, correct? So you see something like the first screenshot, while it should be something like the second one.

What you're after is something that if there's a 'manual' cross-reference that points to a non-existing topic, the topic is created. Correct? If that's what you want it's an easy script.

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

If you work on a PC - even free version of my ID-Tasker should help you with browsing those.

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