I have a large number of items I need to link to in Xway. In Freeway I use a row of asterisks above the items I want to link to and select them and give them an ‘anchor’ name which comprises a letter and then a few numbers. Eaxmple: A012345. I have scoured the Xway documeantation and have not found a way to do this. I did see where the link to is an alphabetical list of items that are on the page. I tried this but did not see a litt of items.
I only want to see the asterisks on the page I am linking to.
If possible, how can I create “named anchors”?
A I really appreciate all the help I have been given.
It sounds like you’re using asterisks to delimit sections of a page, so the appropriate way to do this is to put the content that you want to link to in a container box, and link to that — choose the name of the container box in the Item popup in the Link dialog. If you want to improve the accessibility of your page, you can set the type of the container box to be a section (choose Section from the Type popup in the Box section of the Box Inspector).
[You can type the asterisks at the top of the container box.]
I appreciate Xway being more powerful and easier to use than Freeway, but, for me with over 9000 of these named anchor links in my website, linking them with Xway seems to have taken a step or two backwards.
When you get into the multiple thousands of anchors it may be that a rethink would be good, purely in terms of managing things! But if the anchors within a single page are a more manageable number then I think it’s easier than you may realise. Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding…
Make sure each item you want to link to is given an identifiable name. It may help for these all to begin with the same character, but this needs to be alphabetic rather than a number or a ‘special’ character such as an asterisk.
Select whatever is to be the link, then go to the Link Inspector in the Inspector panel on the right. Set the Link Type from None to Page – this will open a dialog window.
In this dialog you simply (1) pick the page where the intended target lives, then (2) click the Item popup menu and choose the named target from that list.
One key difference with this is that the link target is a named div (a box, an object). If you’re using a massive scrolling run of text and want to link to different places in that, insert an inline div (box, etc.) at the appropriate strategic points, the way you inserted rows of asterisks in your Freeway method. If you really want to preserve the visual appearance of that approach, when inserting your inline divs, copy/paste a box which contains a row of asterisks!
Xway is different in many ways to Freeway. I’ve used and loved Freeway since I saw the first betas, but I have dug into Xway for a little while now and it is seriously good. It is WELL worth pushing through the head-scratching stage that comes with learning new techniques.