Paratext won't mark \xt text as linked in Extra Books, so how do I tell Paratext these books contain cross-references?

Question

We use \xt ...\xt* all the time in Paratext and in many places, like Topical Index, Read through the Bible, Glossary, etc.
But when I use \xt ...\xt* in an XXbook Paratext does NOT activate the link nor validate it.
How do we get Paratext to treat XXBooks like all the other books (like GLO, OTH, FRT, TDX, BAK, etc.)?

And why o why did they limit XXbooks to just A - F and we can't change the labels we see? This seems like it wouldn't be difficult to add.
\id XXA - Selaru - Liturgy

We need a "manage" extra book list dialog like we have for Scripture Reference Book Names.
XXA   Lit.    Liturgy     Sunday Liturgy
etc.

Answer 1

I tried the basic checks on XXA, and they actually do check \xt ...\xt* cross references.
But the icon for "View in Quick Reference window" is missing.  You could file a bug report for that.

Comments

Thanks. We are needing those "View in Quick Reference window" icons, because they give immediate confirmation as to whether the user has typed the reference using the correct format or not.
It is odd that Paratext does not treat all books the same. I have sent a bug report to Paratext Support for this.

Answer 2

It is actually by-design to not show the icons in the extra books. This is entirely for performance reasons since those books can be quite large and are not always broken up by chapter breaks.

Comments

This is very sad that it was decided to remove a feature without any recourse.

Because for all the uses of XX books that we know of in our area of the world, the XX books and/or chapters are small, not large. So, this performance benefit is of no value to any of us, whereas the lack of live links is a major disadvantage. (They give instant verification of valid link structure to the typist.)

Also, the lack of a consistent behavior across all the books in a project is confusing to users. Just a few weeks ago a user we were helping became very puzzled as to why the links were "dead" in his XX book but worked when he copied the content to another extra book (like BAK or OTH).

I too was puzzled and assumed it was a BUG or some new setting that had somehow been switched off for the XX books. It never crossed my mind the UI would be changed to purposefully act inconsistently. (I believe earlier versions of Paratext did support this live links in XX books.)

Surely this should be up to the user or the project, right? The user should be able to decide whether they want to turn off those icons in certain very long "books". Or if that is too fancy, then by default have them on for all books, but allow the project to choose to turn them on/off for all the XX books.