| Marty's suggestion (.1) is the only way to do it now.
But it is messy at best. The problem is that writer A defines
foo_chap as a chapter symbol in A's book. You would like writer
B to be able to say something like <reference>(foo_chap\IN\a_book).
Of course you can't do that (yet), so you have to define the symbol
foo_chap with <define_symbol>, and to avoid confusion with your
own symbols, you probably want to define it as foo_chap_in_a. Next,
what should you define it as? The <define_symbol> tag defines it
as TEXT, not as a CHAPTER symbol. So you have to figure out what
text you want to see when you say <reference>(foo_chap_in_a).
Thus you might define it with
<define_symbol>(foo_chap_in_a\Chapter 9. ) or maybe,
<define_symbol>(foo_chap_in_a\Chapter 9. Testing of blah, blah...)
Most Digital style guides recommend not making such specific
references between books, partly because it is difficult to get
them correct. It is even more difficult to KEEP them correct
because you don't always update the whole docset when you update
one of the books. So, even if DOCUMENT was real smart about finding
symbol definitions in the CRf files of other books, it still has
no control over the printed copy that is lying on someone's desk
in Kalamazoo that has foo_chap defined as chapter 3, rather than
chapter 9.
It's possible to be pretty vague in such a reference and just
strive to keep the book names frozen as soon as one of them goes
to press. Thus you can say something like,
"see the discussion of blah blah testing in <reference>(a_book)."
If A's book has a decent table of contents and index, it shouldn't
be too hard for the user to find that discussion.
When we get to putting it all on-line, won't we have fun with
partial updates if we implement a scheme for more precise cross-
references? I am aging fast enough in this job that I may not
live to face that problem 8-)
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