Deleting a cross reference

[Vanceone]

So I just found out I don't know how to delete a cross reference from text. There doesn't appear to be a "remove cross reference" command, either in menu or in the Macro language.

To be clear, I'm talking about a text that cross references another piece of text. You can change the crux reference, but can you delete it, short of deleting your text and tying it again?

[phspaelti]

I'm at a little bit of a loss understanding your problem. A cross-reference is a single character, which will display as some automatically generated text (usually a page number or the like, but maybe a longer bit of marked text). Since it's only a single character I'm not sure why you are so reluctant to delete it, and why you would worry about "retyping" it.

Or are you asking how you can turn the cross-reference into a (character-for-character) copy of the original? How about "copy and paste"?

[Vanceone]

Well, the problem was that it wasn't a "small piece" of text, it was quite large. I was cross referencing a citation. So I had bookmarked some text; the citation, which I was going to reference elsewhere. The cross reference was the "name of the bookmark."

So it inserted a lengthy string. But I decided not to use it as a cross reference, but I still wanted the citation. So I thought about just unlinking the text, as it were, but there's no way to do that. I guess I just have to copy and paste in that scenario.

[martin]

It sounds like you want to convert an existing cross-reference to remove it, so it's no longer dynamic, ie: automatically updates based on its source. Copy and paste as plain text will do that as you've discovered.

If you want a single command for this task you can also select the cross-reference and use the menu:

• Tools > Automatic Content > Convert to Fixed Content

That will remove the cross-reference so it no longer exists as such; it will be converted to regular text. That command won't remove any formatting, as copy/paste plain text might.