Adding a cross-ref without the link

[Cinnamon]

Hi everyone
I'm creating a set of PDFs. In some cases I need to inform the user that they need to read a topic in one of the other PDFs, but I don't want to give them a link as I've no control over the PDFs they download or where they put them. I need it to look like a cross-ref but without the link functionality. Nothing should happen when the user hovers over the text, for example, "see 'Introduction' in Getting Started Guide".
I also have an HTML output which includes the content across the entire document set, so the default medium x-refs work just fine there. Ideally, I would like my 'fake' x-refs to appear in the Print medium.
Any ideas on how to set the x-ref behaviour, or is there another approach which might work better?
Thanks

Suze

[Nita Beck]

You are on the right track. Bear with me, I'm going on memory of an old project.

You can craft an xref format in your stylesheet and then, in the stylesheet, associate it with a condition and set the exclude action to "unbind" rather than "remove". Set your target to exclude that condition. Flare'll leave the text of the xref, but will remove the underlying link.

Let me see if I can dig this up...

Code: Select all

MadCap|xref.Unbind
{
	mc-format: '“{paratext}”';
	mc-conditions: 'OutputConditions.UnbindXref';
	mc-exclude-action: 'unbind';
}

So what we did here was to wrap the text in quotation marks (which we didn't do for xrefs within the same target; we wanted a visual indicator that we were sending the user elsewhere) and then we said to unbind the xref, that is, the underlying link.

I hope this gives you some ideas.

[Cinnamon]

Thank you Nita. I'll give that a try!
Take care.

[Cinnamon]

That worked! Fantastic. Thanks again Nita.