How do you find broken cross references? the ones that say : “Error: Reference source not found” and make you look silly when people are reviewing your papers?
Also it bothers me how silently these appear, I was moving something broke the cross reference and never knew? disturbing.
Using the Alternative Find and Replace
http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center/alternative-dialog-find-replace-for-writer
in conjununction with
[::Reference::]Error
Will pull up broken cross reference, although I admit, this isn’t the easiest way.
export as pdf and search in the pdf.
I used to use this extension too, but it somehow refuses to appear in LO now. Has something in LO changed so that it’s no longer compatible? Are you still able to use it in recent versions of LO?
Never mind. I’ve updated it and it appears now.
Like to add this for the less-savvy: Remember to enable “Regular expressions” in the Options box.
There has never been a facility built into LO to search for cross-references. The text of the displayed error is “Error: Reference source not found”. This can only be searched for using external tools, such as an extension, or by unzipping the ODT, extracting the content.xml file, and searching the text of the XML for the error message. For example under GNU/Linux:
$ unzip -p source.odt content.xml | xmllint --format - | grep -e "Error: Reference source not found"
This will indicate if there are any broken cross-references. There does not appear to be any related open bug report for this issue, however Apache OpenOffice issues aoo#37648 and aoo#87541 seem to be requests for such a facility.
The old Apache OpenOffice XrefManager extension may also be worth a look. EDIT: Refer answer by @taylorh140.