Validate Cross References

Asciidoctor provides limited support for validating internal cross references. Validation occurs when a cross reference is first visited. Since there are still some references aren’t stored in the parse tree (such as an anchor in the middle of a paragraph), which can lead to false positives, these validations are hidden behind a flag.

You can enable validation of cross references from the CLI by passing the -v and from the API by setting the $VERBOSE variable to true. This puts the processor in pedantic mode. In this mode, the parser will immediately validate cross references, issuing a warning message if the reference is not valid.

Consider the following example:

If you run Asciidoctor in verbose/pedantic mode on this document, it will send the following warning message to the logger.

An AsciiDoc processor only validates references within the same document (after includes are resolved).