Our service procedure manuals contain a change table that uses a cross-reference to each topic that has changed, formatted as a page number.
Several topics are reused in each procedure, therefore multiple times per manual. Example: The first topic in each procedure is the topic that instructs the user how to "Power down the system."
When the Change Table is generated, the cross-reference to the page of the changed topic is resolved, but to the last time the repeated topic is used in the manual.
Question
Is there a way to show the page number of the first location of the topic? We've just lived with it, but I've decided to see if there is something I can do that I (obviously) didn't think of.
I don't think so Trish. If your repeated topic was instead a snippet that lived inside various different container topics, you could then link to a specific container instead of the repeated content itself. If you only ever want to do this for the Change Log, you could have two versions of the container topic - a FirstUse version and a GeneralUse version (the general one gets repeated after the first use). Then just link to the FirstUse topic in your ChangeLog. But that might be clunky to implement or difficult to manage and maintain.