Currently, the AsciiDoc attributes for producing the assembly file (and subsequently for converting it) are collated and rewritten per component version. For the most part this works. However, if any of the attributes contain page references, those page references have to be external (rather than internal). That's because the pages in the assembly aren't yet known. If the attributes were collated (or at least rewritten) per assembly, then the pages in the assembly would be known and the references to pages included in the assembly could be internal. There are ways to optimize this logic. For example, if the attributes don't contain any page references, the attributes would only have to be prepared once per component version. It's also possible to separate collating and rewriting attribute values, again as an optimization.