Reply To: Link to a topic heading?

[Su-Laine Yeo]

Hi Fa,

That's actually a really good question. The folder icons in the Map Editor represent Topic Headings, which are DITA elements. I've found that I can make a cross-reference to a element in a map, but it doesn't appear properly in output. According to the DITA language reference (http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.1/CD02/langspec/common/thetypeattribute.html), “topichead” is not a valid target of a cross-reference, so I believe that cross-references to elements is just not within the realm of DITA.

What you can do instead of using a Topic Heading is to use a topic containing a title and nothing else. It is easy to make a cross-reference to a topic. There are other advantages to this approach, in particular that translation management systems tend to handle it better.

By the way, Gunnar is right that general DITA questions are usually answered more efficiently in the dita-users Yahoo! group. It's sometimes hard to know whether a problem is purely DITA or involves XMetaL, so there's no harm in posting it here to see if we can address it.

Cheers,
Su-Laine

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