I’m new (though I’ve already spent hours moving my old snippets and learning the interface). So just point me to the right place if I’ve got this wrong.
As I understand it, to link to another document in DTP, I have to select the document I want to link to, choose from the edit menu copy item link (or remember an obscure shortcut), then in the document I’m working in go to the format menu, click that, and then paste the result of my previous action.
It seems it would be nice if we could get something like a dialog box, perhaps with some AI, that would let us just select the item we want to link, like in any modern web page editor.
Select some text within a rich text document. Control-click (right click) on the selected text and choose the contextual menu option, “Link To”. Use the navigation pane that appears to select the target document.
And then there’s Wiki linking. If you wish to use Wiki links, go to Preferences > Editing and check the option to turn Wikilinking on (there are subordinate options). Now, select text and Control-click on it; choose the contextual menu option “Make Link”.
If the selected text is the Name of a document in the database, this will establish a link to it.
Else, a new document will be created, with its Name the same as the selected text, and a link will be established to this document.
Method 1 as described by Bill is, for me, quite a bit more cumbersome than what the original post described. While it works perfectly fine, if your database is anything like mine it is huge and navigating with the mouse and/or keyboard arrow keys gets tricky: one false move and you have to figure out where you were, especially if you are navigating numerous sub-groups (maybe that’s my problem right there!) that may or may not involve quite a bit of scrolling.
As well, what gets displayed in the navigation pane is not the same order as what appears in the database (at least with mine) so finding the right document can be a bit tricky sometimes.
I’d like to echo jlehet’s call for a dialogue box when making links within DT, perhaps even with a preview (not unlike, for example, Default Folder X).
chatoyer, I see your point. The method I described (which is what I generally use, even though I’ve also got large databases) requires that I know not only the name of the document to which I which to link, but also its group location. Perhaps from a Search result listing.
But if I already know the target document’s Name, a dialog into which I could directly enter or paste that Name would be a shortcut. That would be fine for unique documents or perhaps even replicants. But if I’m using duplicates, perhaps even with variations of content, it could be problematic. As it happens, I often create new a new group for a project and will replicate or duplicate some reference materials into that project. When I establish links for the project, I want the links to refer to the specific documents of that project. I may have copied a reference into the project so as to mark it up, summarize it and so on, without having “vandalized” my original reference document. But they have the same Name.
That would mean that the dialog would have to be relatively complex. After I entered a document Name, I would need to see a list of the locations of documents with the same Name, so that I could choose the correct one.