Hi. I built a book for a client that consists of 74 separate files. It documents an API, and each file explains one call. It is extensively cross-referenced with See Alsos. It looks and works great as a PDF and the client loves it. They love it so much that they want me to convert it to HTML.
InDesign outputs competent HTML and (now that I know what it's doing) a reasonable CSS, too. I can hand-edit the HTML and CSS using DreamWeaver.
When converting to HTML, InDesign outputs each document file in the book as a single HTML file. (It cannot output a whole book as a single file, nor can it output a book as a set of separate files in one operation. Each file is done one at a time as a stand-alone.)
I can't find a good method to convert all those inter-document See Also cross-references into HTML hyperlinks. (I haven't even thought about the index or TOC yet...) Within a single document, any cross-references magically turn into working hyperlinks. Between documents, the cross-reference produces HTML code that gives me an empty <a href=""> followed by my cross-reference text, followed by the closing </a>. The href destination is empty. I have considered manually filling in each one (there are lots), but this will make updates very difficult going forward. I have considered creating duplicates for every single See Also (there are a couple of hundred) through the book, and using conditional text to turn them on and off (thus maintaining compatibility between PDF and HTML), and creating hyperlinks -- one by one -- for each using the Hyperlink panel. But before I go through all that conversion work I thought I'd ask...
Does anybody have a better way of turning existing cross-references into HTML hyperlinks when they go between-documents? Script? GREP? Anything?
Thanks.
JW
