Re: tricky odt export needs

[Christian Moe <mail@christianmoe.com>]

Jambunathan K writes:

> The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
> that has been posted to gmane.emacs.orgmode as well.
>
>
> Christian Moe <mail@christianmoe.com> writes:
>
>> You can do cross-references with ordinary links. Have a look at the
>> manual section 4.2, "Internal links". However, what you get out of the
>> box is textual references to e.g. section headings, not page
>> references. You can change that for each reference individually by
>> right-clicking on them in LibreOffice. There should be a way to get
>> page references by default, but off the cuff, I'm not sure how.
>
> I am interested in rolling out support for xref by pagenumbers.  I would
> like to know what the standard or recommended practice is like.
>
> So, when one says "I want pagenumbers for xref", what xref-es they have
> in mind.  Do they mean ONE-or-SOME-or-ALL of a xref to outline headings,
> figure, table, source listings, formula etc.

I don't know what recommended practice is would be.

My own take on this is that all objects you mention are probably
best left as xrefs to the section, figure etc. concerned, exported as
section title, section number, figure number etc. as appropriate. 

On a different thread, however, I have suggested that xrefs to
*dedicated link targets* should export as page numbers in ODT. (Or this
should be made an option.)

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/79096

Nicolas Goaziou raised a couple of objections on that thread, as did
you. I forgot to copy my reply to the list, and I think I partly
misunderstood what Nicolas was saying, anyway.

Nicolas raised a use case I'd forgotten about: Dedicated link targets in
list items are currently exported as the item number. Nicolas suggested
that item numbers are more useful than page numbers here, and he's
probably right. But keeping this behavior would make my proposal more
complex to implement and maintain.

Nicolas also raised concerns over backend compatibility. However, I
don't think this is a strong argument against introducing page number
references. A page reference solution makes sense for paged media (ODT,
LaTeX backends) but not for screen (HTML).

Finally, it should also be considered to make page numbers the default
for *non-numbered* headings:

When headings are not numbered in export (#+options: num:nil), current
ODT export outputs a cross-reference with a descriptive text equal to
the heading text of the item the dedicated target is in. However, this
seems to be fragile; as soon as you Update Fields in LibreOffice, the
cross-reference collapses to an empty space. The other backends also
seem to struggle with the case of xrefs to headings without heading
numbering.

Yours,
Christian