I am responsible for maintaining and updating a long manual with many cross-references. Most of these cross-references are internal to the book collection, but a significant minority reference specific sections in other books that make up the manual or specific sections in other reference documents external to my organization. The ability to use the cross-reference tools to manage internal cross-references is a godsend. Manually tracking external cross-references, however, is extremely tedious and mistake-prone. Obviously it would not be possible to provide hyperlinks or automatic updating for external cross-references. However, I would still like a way to keep track of them in InDesign.

I would love for InDesign to provide the following workflow for managing external cross-references:
1. Provide a way to mark text strings as external cross-references. This could either be within the existing Insert Cross-Reference tool or a separate new tool. Ideally there would be an option to add metadata, such as the title and edition of the external document being referenced.
2. Provide a way to export an external cross-reference report as .CSV or other table format. This table would list each text string marked as an external cross reference, along with the page number where it appears in the InDesign document and any other metadata defined for that record.
3. Provide an option to toggle on and off highlighting of text marked as external cross references in InDesign.