Maintaining cross references in manuscripts.

Authors face the tedious bookkeeping problem of maintaining the consistency of references to figures, page numbers, and other numbered entities in successive drafts of a manuscript. If a figure is added to or deleted from the manuscript, the numbers of all subsequent figures must be adjusted, along with the references to these figures. In this note, we show how the UNIX(TM) commands grep, awk, and sed can be used to create a simple and flexible reference assembler that automatically maintains the consistency of cross references in manuscripts.