Master doc is tested from ES

ES->OS: same problem in a 644s1-1. I added a small sample doc.

Created attachment 4648 [details]
a simple master doc. Have a look a the second doc and the cross-reference numbering

Reassigned to OS

.

Additional problem: Footnote references wrong  internal task #106427#

If you have two [Writer-] documents with 1 footnote and you have one
reference in one of the documents to the footnote you run into trouble
if you put them together into a "Master document":

BUG: The footnote reference will point to e.g. "1" but if it's the
second document in the Masterdoc the pointer is wrong. It then points
to the footnote from the firest document which is also a "1".

OS: The references identify the appropriate footnote with a sequence
number. This number is unique inside of the document but they are
changed when the document is inserted into a new document. In
Insert/File there a correction of the field is done but not when the
file is linked.

SBA->OS: As discussed, target changed to OO.org 2.0

.

SBA: According to the OpenOffice.org roadmap 
http://tools.openoffice.org/releases
this issue was retargeted to OOo Later.

OS:  Would you please take a look at Issue 19970?  There are enough
similarities there that it may be a duplicate of this issue.  However,
the reported behavior relates to copying and pasting the contents of
two documents into one new document, as opposed to an MD.

os->tamblyne: Further investigation is necessary to check if they are
duplicates. I have added #19970# to my issue portfolio ;-)

3

Hi!

Had the same problem, could repair it through 'rebuilding' the sub-docs. Which
means copying any text (without any links or figures) to another doc, afterwards
inserting the figures and the links by hand...
Now it works somehow, No problems so far with the new sub-docs. No idea where
the mistake came from. 

Fabian

*** Issue 36661 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

*** Issue 19997 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

*** Issue 34829 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

*** Issue 19929 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

*** Issue 25674 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

*** Issue 33711 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

Is issue 17882 a duplicate of this issue?

I'm having problems which seem to be related to this issue where cross-
references to footnotes or endnotes are not resolved correctly when the 
subdocuments are linked in a master document.  I've tried this with setting the 
link properties for footnotes in subdocuments to reset to 1 for each chapter 
and without resetting to 1 and they still come out wrong either way.  What's 
more some are correct and some are not.  The only work-around, which is not 
really an option, is to disable write protection in the link file properties 
and edit the cross-references in the master document manually.  Of course this 
mean the master document can not be updated again and since I have a couple of 
hundred cross-references spread out over almost 400 pages this is not a 
workable solution.

This exact same problem exists in non-master documents with linked sections 
containing the sub-documents.  I'm attaching 4 file which show this problem: 1 
master document, 2 subdocuments containing footnotes and cross-references, and 
1 non-master document with linked sections containing the same two subdocuments.

Created attachment 32014 [details]
Sub-document 1

Created attachment 32015 [details]
Sub-document2

Created attachment 32016 [details]
Master document cross-reference error, hope it works as no option for .odm attachment

Created attachment 32017 [details]
Non-master w/ linked sections cross-reference error

*** Issue 63406 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

Same as my issue - 56625 Incorrect references to equations in master document.
It is problem not only for illustrations but also for "Text" references
(equations) and other. Also very problematic are references with level more than
2 (e.g. 2.1.1). It is shame that since 2003 problem doesn't solved yet.

Created attachment 35721 [details]
Master document with 2 subdocuments

In the attached file Chapters.zip are all references in the second subdocument
(Chapter2.odt) bad, but in the Chapter1.odt, as you can see, are all references
correct.

After 2 days I have found workaround of this problem. It is little bit
cumbersome but it works. For each subdocument you have to replace name of
variable for automatic numbering (which type is Field, Number Range, Text for
equations, Illustration for pictures, Table for tables, etc.) with the DIFFERENT
name in each document. 
For example, if I have 3 subdocuments with names Chapter1.odt, Chapter2.odt,
Chapter3.odt then in the first document you have to replace the variable which
name is "Text" to "Chapter1Text" (or "Illustration" to "Chapter1Illustration",
etc.) in the second document you have to change "Text" to "Chapter2Text" (or
"Illustration" to "Chapter2Illustration", etc.) and in the third document "Text"
to "Chapter3Text". After that you have to change also all references in each
subdocumets. All you can see in the attached document NewChapters.zip.

Currently I am working on the macro which will do this automatically.

Created attachment 35729 [details]
Master document and 3 subdocuments with all correct references

Any news on the macro?

Hello,

macro for changing text fields is ready for use, but I didn't want to write help
for it (The dialog is realy very simple). 
You can install this macro like other packages: Open Tools/Package Manager and
select My Packages from the dialog. Then click the Add button to install the
downloaded file. 
Then you can run the macro with: Tools/Macros/Run Macro... and select My
Macros/LibraryChangeTextFields/ChangeTextFields from the dialog. Name of the
main macro is CreateAndRunDialog. Then click the Run button.

If you want, you can download it from
http://fractal.dam.fmph.uniba.sk/~kg/bohdal/OOoError/ChangeTextFields.uno.pkg

*** Issue 58721 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

*** Issue 56625 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

*** Issue 53515 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

Due to report of Issue 53515 I expand the scope in the subject to "equations",
because I am pretty sure that it is a general cross reference problem. Pls. feel
free to separate issue 53515 if you disagree!

I hit this problem recently. By the time I'd tried working round the problem
locally, then gone and searched on oooforums.org, then finally found this bug,
I'd probably wasted at least a couple of hours on this issue. I wonder how many
other users have also wasted a lot of time on this.

IMO, cross-references that don't work _reliably_ are worse than not having
cross-references at all.

If this is not likely to be fixed soon, how about adding a warning to the
"Insert Cross Reference" dialogue that indicates that there may be problems
using cross references with master documents? Drawing attention to bugs might
not be good advertising, but wasting time on cross references that might not
work hardly does much for the image of the software either.

I have a cross reference to an image which uses both the "Category and Number"
and "Above/Below" references, to give a result which reads as "see Figure 6.9,
above".  The figure is several paragraphs above the reference. This appears
correctly in the subdocument, but when included in the master document the
reference reads as "see Figure 6.9, below".

This is slightly different from the way that this issue has manifested itself
for me previously, in that the cross-references seem to relate to the correct
image, and clicking on either of them jumps to it, but the "above/below" text is
incorrect. In other cases the cross reference has actually pointed to the wrong
location, rather than to the right location with the wrong text.


This may be a different, but related, issue. Feel free to split this out into a
separate report if necessary.

RETRACTION

I'd like to retract the previous comment - pressing F9 in the master document
(after updating the subdocument) fixed the "above/below" problem.

The other occurrences of cross references pointing to the wrong location are
still present though, so my first comment about adding a warning to the dialogue
still stands.

   Same problem observed with Linked section in non master document. As already
pointed out. Is there any update on this issue? Can we expect a fix soon and if
so is there a target release???
   Does it make any sense to try to incorporate the code in the macro created by
bohdal into the insertion code that handles the sections and the master document
fractions?
   A strategy like the following:
   1) Temporarily rename all fields into SectionXXX.fielddescriptor so that
things dont break during document merging.
   2) Then remove the section descriptor and this time increment the field
descriptors globally.

This should rectify the problem no?

Someone from the OO herd let me know if this makes sense or I am way out of the
subject

George

This one should really be fixed soon (OOo 3.0?). I noticed, that the workaround
from  bohdal seems to break automatically generated Illustration Indexes etc...
Any ideas on how to fix that?

It would be really nice if somebody could inform us normal people,
waiting since 2003 on the progress of this issue.
Not exactly complaining but.. well... getting restless.
Is OO3.0 a possibility?
This issue keeps us from working with complicated multipart texts.

An answer would be really welcomed here!

well I belong to the normal people group too...

the milestone is set to later, which I interpret as we have hardly any chance to
see this issue fixed in OOo 3.0
just hope I'm wrong !!

As the target is set to later there will be no fix in OOo 3.0

I wait for a buxfix since switched from Framemaker to OpenOffice in 2003. I work
on two big Documents with over 250 Pages with lots of Crossreferencs. To put the
stuff in one single Document is also no option because pdf generation doesn't
work equitable (ooO crashes), and Gui slows done some times. It makes me very
sad  that Ooo ist not recommendable for big documents since 5 years, and
encumbered me competing my work. Although i love doing my work with this Tool,
and once more switching to another document format is not realy an option for
me. :-( In my eyes this is a high Priority Bug. With the words of another
poster: "Having not working Crossreferences ist like having no Crossreferences".
Perhaps there is a competing product in future - with working Crossreferences.

I fully agree with the last comments. I have been waiting for actually years 
for a solution and have to state that this bug makes it nearly impossible to 
work with large documents within OOo. Please reconsider the target milestone 
if somehow possible!

I have just run into this bug trying to create a book with a master document.
Although I am probably wasting my breath, I just want to voice my desire to have
this fixed. The master document functionality of OOo is very powerful taken in
the abstract, but this specific bug makes it nearly worthless. I cannot believe
it is so difficult to fix. I wonder how many documents have been created in
error because of this. Please fix it.

All previous mailers have my full support! I'm dealing with a more than 250
pages book with many chapters and lots of references from Version 1.x to now.
Coherent numbering across chapters doesn't really work. This is not a minor bug
but a major drawback, rendering the master document capability of Writer quite
useless for me. I confess I have not tried version 3.0.1. I also acknowledge
that OO is for free. But leaving users alone with so much frustration, effort
and wasted time over years is disappointing. Please fix it as soon as possible!

I tried again with OOO310_m6:

problem still exists biut seems to be even worse. REferences in loaded master
documents now seems to point to the first item of a referenced cathegory.
References will be changed on "Update All" but will still be wrong (as initially
described in this issue).

I can confirm this bug still in 3.0.1. This is a serious bug! We use master
documents to write long and important texts. I have here more than 100 pages and
only now I saw this bug, just before printing the final version. I trusted too
much on OOo? Shouldn't I use it for important and complicated texts? If I could
program, this would be my first task. We are giving our life on a text, hopping
on our work tool and it brokes just at the end? Please, think on me, gartus
(250p), heavy (a book), fkumkar (years), bauchladen (500p) and so many others.

Tengo el mismo problema. Llevo varios años usando Framemaker para escribir
documentos largos divididos en capítulos. Ahora, después de un tiempo empleando
Openoffice para pequeños documentos he invertido mucho tiempo para crear
plantillas, escribir más de 200pags. en 8 subdocumentos y al juntarlos en un
Master document, las referencias son aleatorias. No he usado referencias a otros
subdocumentos, todas las referencias son internas a cada subdocumento y en cada
subdocumento son correctas pero en el Master document no.

He pasado varios días intenteando resolver el problema porque pensaba que era un
fallo mío, no me podía creer que fuese un bug tan grave. Considero un fallo muy
grave que pase tanto tiempo sin corregir y no parece que haya mucho interés en
corregirlo después de tanto tiempo detectado. No me gustaría tener que volver a
Framemaker y tampoco a MS-Office. Por favor atiendan estas súplicas.

Mi sistema: WindowsXP+SP2 y versión Ooo 3.0.0 (OOO300m9 build:9358)

A work-around is to use manually inserted cross references: Selecting the
figure/table/etc number and Going to Insert -> Fields -> Others -> Cross
reference tab, select "Set reference", give a name to that reference and then
use _that_ name (not the list with the field entries) from "Insert reference"...
just the same you need to do to cross reference _between sub-documents_.
This is a lot of useless work, because you always need to cross-reference more
items _inside_ a sub-document than _between_ them: keeping track of hundreds of
cross reference names is clearly more work than listing only a few dozens...
IMHO, this issue needs a higher priority... specially if we consider it was
reported six years ago.

My workaround was to combine all subdocuments to one document in one piece.
Checking all references then is also a burden but it worked!

This bug should be marked as P2 (because "An essential product feature - e.g.
Printing - does not work at all, and no workaround exists;" and/or "User data is
corrupted in an easy-to-encounter way;" and/or "A critical usability problem").
The rgb's workaround only works for who is starting from scratch, and the merge
in one large document (proposed by gartus, and the way I encountered to not
loose my entire work) is not a workaround since we aren't working with master
document anymore. A large document is a pain: slow to work, hard to navigate,
impossible to interchange with co-workers, difficult to reorder...

Who choose to split the text and work with master document is a serious writer,
working with large documents and a lot of cross references. We may be few here
(49 votes), but we are important: aren't oowriter designed for writers? 

If not corrected soon, I think the master document feature should be disabled,
since it fails silently when is too late. 

Please, could any developer review this bug and mark it P2 or, at least, drop a
word here for us?

I fully agree with Dedalu. The Master Document is a great feature, one of the
best in OO. In the end it falls miserably on a few bugs. I am an experienced
writer. As it now is I use Master documents just for keeping track of book
chapters as long as I just write plain text. Whenever I want to begin working
with illustrations or advanced features, I have to change to other programs. As
I see it it is very hard to use Master docs to produce an academic book.
I hope this (and a few other bugs with Master docs) could be fixed soon!  

*** Issue 102521 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

I can only confirm that the issue is still highly relevant in OOo 3.1, as I just
ran into it, 5 days before the deadline for my masters thesis. 
So could we prettyplease elevate it to P2 type bug and get a target milestone?
Or at least some explanation to what is wrong?

We are also having a problem with this, and having not noticed it until a week
before our document needs to be released, this may cause us to stop using OO and
go back to Word for the foreseeable future.  We simply cannot release a document
with incorrect cross references.  I will be trying some of the workarounds to
see if they work for us.

This issue should be raised to an extremely high category. A feature that
doesn't work reliably is NOT a feature. My 240 page book consisting of 14
chapters in separate files and assembled by a Master document had random
cross-reference errors. I had to export as a single document and then hand edit
in order to publish. Without this feature OO isn't a serious tool and I might as
well use abiword.

This is a problem for me also.  I changed from MS Word Master Documents which 
suck the big one to OOo Writer because it seemed a lot more stable.  I am just 
getting my Master doc together in OOo and ran into this bug.  It needs to be 
fixed to keep OOo a strong compeditor to MSWord.  I use OOo 3.1 and XP.

*** Issue 100448 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

Bug 11174 has been around since 2003!
There are around a dozen duplicates of that bug and many people complaining
about having to hand-edit cross-references in order to publish a document.

Please fix this!

As I said previously, This issue should be raised to an extremely high category.
A feature that doesn't work reliably is NOT a feature. My 240 page book
consisting of 14 chapters in separate files and assembled by a Master document
had random cross-reference errors. I had to export as a single document and then
hand edit in order to publish. Without this feature OO isn't a serious tool and
I might as well use abiword.

While this feature may be hard for the developers to duplicate, it is VERY real
and VERY serious to any serious writer.

For one of my Books i switched a few months ago to  pdfLATEX with typerref Package. The odt File with 
over 3MB size, is shrunk to a 188kB Lyx File!!! (tex: 300kB) It works nearly perfect, great community 
support, PDF export is excellent. Please Open Office Guys... do your Homework, take a look to competing 
products, and please FIX THIS (in my eyes) HIGH PRIORITY BUG. I cant believe that it takes so may years to 
fix it. And i cant believe, that i wait all this  years...

This really needs to get fixed.  There have been enough other issues marked as
duplicate - this would seem to indicate that it is a desired fix.  It seems like
it is not a high enough priority, either.  This is a MAJOR problem to anyone
creating lengthy documents that contain references to figures, tables, etc. 
We've encountered this problem again, and now have to go through and create
named references for each of the hundreds of tables and figures, and replace the
current table/figure references to use the named ones.  This is going to consume
a LOT of our time, and it is making our management reconsider the decision to
move to Open Office for this document, rather than using Word.

This really needs to get fixed.  There have been enough other issues marked as
duplicate - this would seem to indicate that it is a desired fix.  It seems like
it is not a high enough priority, either.  This is a MAJOR problem to anyone
creating lengthy documents that contain references to figures, tables, etc. 
We've encountered this problem again, and now have to go through and create
named references for each of the hundreds of tables and figures, and replace the
current table/figure references to use the named ones.  This is going to consume
a LOT of our time, and it is making our management reconsider the decision to
move to Open Office for this document, rather than using Word.

Here I am starting another large, multi-chapter book and I CANNOT use the very
features touted as advantages of OOo Writer. What good are Master Documents if
the feature is unreliable. Please elevate this to high, HIGH priority.

Unbelievable, that this is not fixed yet... first post is 7 years ago, too much time for such a fatal error. And 
now the Target milestone is "OOo Later"... Im looking forward to the next 7 years... it seems to last a 
lifetime to get  fixed.

 

83 votes and 8 years later...

Has any progress been made on this?

The Status has changed from "OOo Later" to "Started" one year ago. I think, this is not an easy one to fix, 
and no one has a good mind to do this stuff ;-)

*** Issue 117615 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***

The work-arounds for this bug appear to be:

1. Don't use master documents.  Cross-references within and between chapters for Illustrations and Tables don't work.

2. Reword cross-references.  Instead of writing "See Illustration 3.14", write "See the illustration below" or "See the second table from the bottom two pages back".

This is still broken in 3.4 Alpha 104

How is the LibreOffice in this issue?

The question is: Will it be fixed in this century? May be it is better to remove this functionality completely from the Source. Writers don't have time for any dirty hacks that maybe or not brings that result tat is promised... Fix the functionality, or remove it, but don´t make a promise that this product isn´t able to deliver... (... yes, i am a software developer too)... Its little frustrating, to wait  8 Years to finish one of my writing Projects, because of this failure!!!

(In reply to comment #30)
> After 2 days I have found workaround of this problem. It is little bit
> cumbersome but it works. For each subdocument you have to replace name of
> variable for automatic numbering (which type is Field, Number Range, Text for
> equations, Illustration for pictures, Table for tables, etc.) with the
> DIFFERENT name in each document. 

Late comer on LibreOffice 3.3.4. So many thanks for the workaround, for a reliable use of master documents on my version. It's marked as fixed, on the LO bug tracker, for version 3.5. see https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35669.

Sadly, nomnex reported 4 days later in the LibreOffice bug he cited that it actually doesn't work in LibreOffice 3.5 or 3.6, despite the fact that the bug is marked fixed.

The cross-referencing technique described in the Master Documents chapter of the Writer guide works (see http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOoAuthors_User_Manual/Writer_Guide/Cross-referencing_between_subdocuments), but it only allows you cite a page number or text that you can select. Thus, I can't cite a precise footnote number, just a page. Furthermore, it's more cumbersome to make cross-references in this way, and every existing cross-reference must be replaced with a new one made in the manner indicated.

Even worse, after using the cross reference workaround for years where you use a special counter variable name for each subdoc, something appears to have changed in Libreoffice (using version 3.6.3.2 presently) that breaks this workaround.

In employing the workaround, I would typically create a new counter variable type in each subdoc.  This is easily done while adding a caption simply by typing the name directly into the caption type field of the caption dialog box, i.e. rather than just selecting one of the options in the drop down (Table, Illustration, etc.).  So if I'm working on a subdoc called "foo", I would create "fooTable" captions.

This automatically creates a counter variable called fooTable, and a paragraph style for the caption called fooTable.  However, I don't want the reference text to say "Refer to fooTable 3-1 on page 33", so I would simply delete the "foo" from the actual table caption, and all was well,...the cross reference text would follow suit.  

However, in the latest version of Libreoffice, I now see that if I touch that caption text to remove the "foo", Libreoffice seems to be detecting that caption text no longer matches the paragraph style, which in turn is bound to the counter variable name. 

So on its face it seems like the Libreoffice/openoffice team has conspired to break the only decent workaround for this hugely problematic and longstanding bug.  

Swell.

Regards,

Joe

I should have been more clear in my previous reply.

When Libreoffice detects that I've modifed the caption text to remove the "foo" in the "fooTable" caption text, it no longer reflects the caption type at all in the cross reference.  So where in previous versions I would successfully get "see Table 3-1 on page 33", now I just get "see 3-1 on page 33".

Because the workaround requires a unique counter variable name, and because this is apparently bound to the paragraph style, I'm not sure how to workaround this new problem.  Any suggestions would certainly be appreciated.

Regards,

Joe

This bug is causing me difficulty in completing a book I'm writing.
I have discovered that the algorithm used to produce illustration numbers is different for separate files than it is for a master document.
I suspect something similar is causing the illustration references in the text to be incorrect.

This should not be prioritized as trivial because it is a huge issue when you are writing hundreds of pages and needing to use references.

This bug has been known and not fixed for 11 years now.

Will someone please update us on the status?

I can load the same master document (that was created in openoffice) in LibreOffice Version: 4.3.5.2 (Mac), update all Links, and all references (equations, figures) are correctly linked.

Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".