AnthonyMarrian

Thank you, Walt. I replied to you last night (from my iPhone) but can't see the message. Despite looking really, really hard, I never saw the item you've ringed; I must have been fixated on the items that can be ticked. Appreciate the clarification.

My flow options for Heading 1 don't have a Keep with Next setting (see screen grab). However, setting the flow options of Heading 2 to "Keep with previous paragraph" seems to have sorted it.

Please can I thank all those who helped me with this problem.? I have seen the error of my ways, made corrections, and the TOC is behaving (almost) perfectly. My last remaining quandary is how to arrange it such that a Heading 1 TOC item does not appear all on its own at the bottom of a page (i.e. without the accompanying Heading 2 items). Of course, I can edit it manually, but I just wondered if there was a Heading 1 / Heading 2 widows and orphans equivalent.

There are only three text styles: Heading 1, Heading 2, and Body text. In the example above Heading 1 is applied to the blue Weddings and children item, Heading 2 to Wisdom, Buffalo etc, and Body Text to the text (not seen here) that follows a Heading 2 item. The TOC was generated correctly originally; it was only after editing a section (with no changes made to text styles) that the re-generated TOC started producing extraneous entries (for the avoidance of doubt, all the Heading 2 "Weddings and children" entries are extraneous, and do not exist in the text). I could move the whole project into InDesign, but that would mean learning an entirely new piece of software, although, if it works properly, that might well save me time in the long run. Or, I could just create a manual TOC in Affinity once the project is finalized. Walt, thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, I can't share the document at the moment, and I don't have the time (for now) to try to create a reproduceable example of the problem.

Thank you Oufti. I will look more closely at this tomorrow. What is perplexing is that the problematic TOC has only occurred after some minor edits to the project, with no alteration to text style. I wonder whether version 2, to which I recently upgraded, has a slightly different method of generating TOCs. I’ll report back.

There are only three text styles: Heading 1, Heading 2, and Body text. In the example above Heading 1 is applied to the blue Weddings and children item, Heading 2 to Wisdom, Buffalo etc, and Body Text to the text (not seen here) that follows a Heading 2 item. The TOC was generated correctly originally; it was only after editing a section (with no changes made to text styles) that the re-generated TOC started producing extraneous entries (for the avoidance of doubt, all the Heading 2 "Weddings and children" entries are extraneous, and do not exist in the text). I could move the whole project into InDesign, but that would mean learning an entirely new piece of software, although, if it works properly, that might well save me time in the long run. Or, I could just create a manual TOC in Affinity once the project is finalized. Walt, thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, I can't share the document at the moment, and I don't have the time (for now) to try to create a reproduceable example of the problem.

My book consists of 21 separate sections. I have a perfectly behaving table of contents (see attached "before" screenshot). However, when I add several pages to a section, delete a second section in its entirety, and update the table of contents, I get the result shown in the "after" screen shot. Notice that the TOC generation has taken a Heading 1 item (Weddings and Children) and placed a copy of it as a Heading 2 item in the preceding section. You can see this additionally for the Humanities section at the bottom of the "After" screenshot. This behaviour is repeated throughout the re-generated TOC. In addition, the regeneration is adding random Heading 1 items to the Heading 1 section in question. Notice the extraneous "Food" items in the Random screenshot, none of which exists in the text. The amount of time I am spending trying to overcome problems that occur in AP is really beginning to affect my view of this software.

To avoid my book becoming unmanageable, I've split it into self-contained sections. There is no frame link between sections. When I create the book, I just add the sections in the right order, and then export the book to PDF. If I add a page to the section before the number oddity, it makes no difference to the numbering.

Good idea, but nothing revealed. I've also noticed that the numbering goes astray over a section i.e. it's correct at the end of a section, and, if numbering is going to go awry (which it doesn't always), then it will do so at the beginning of the next section.

It also jumps from 158 to 161. I'm beginning to think that AP has a problem with numbering sidenotes.

My sidenotes jump from 85 to 87 (these numbers are created during renumbering when exporting a book consisting of multiple sections). Assuming that AP is renumbering correctly, how do I search for note 86, which may be there but hidden? Many thanks.

Given that my body text style *always* follows the heading text style, setting it to be the next style looks sensible, and I've done that. Thank you

That's very, very helpful. Thank you. Pasting from Notepad does indeed give the appearance of paragraphs because of the line feeds. Providing explicit paragraph breaks between each paragraph will be time-consuming, but I can see that it might lead to much tighter control of the text.

I'm finding some very time-consuming and frustrating errors with my project. I create single pages (not facing), use a text frame that covers most of the page, a side-bar that runs vertically down each page (the same height as the text frame), and a numbering text frame that includes section name and page number. The test originates in Microsoft Word, but I take the precaution of copying it to Notepad before then copying and pasting it into Affinity Publisher. I then use Autoflow to flow the text into the required number of pages. I then make liberal use of side-notes, which are configured to sit to the right of the side-bar. Frustration includes hidden text i.e. text that is there (and can be searched) but which does not appear at the bottom of the frame nor at the top of the next frame. When this first happened, guidance from this forum suggested turning off widows and orphans for the text style being used. This actually cured the initial problem. However, I now have the same problem, this time in relation to text that uses a bespoke Heading text style. In addition to the hidden text, I have a text style oddity. Often, I will apply a text style to selected text without effect. I then apply a different text style, and, when I reapply the text style I want, everything works. However, I have a heading where the heading text style being applied is not taking, so I try the trick of switching text styles, at which point the entire preceding paragraph takes on the new text style, and then also takes on any further styles applied. It is as though without being instructed the heading has become attached to a preceding batch of text. I looked at the heading properties and noticed a "detach from paragraph" option but that has no effect. Please can I have some advice as to how best to proceed (best practice) when dealing with large amounts of text. Many thanks

The text was hidden in that it wasn’t at the bottom of the existing frame, nor at the top of the next frame. It would appear when the existing frame’s height was altered, but altering the height is actually not an option. For whatever reason, removing the widows and orphan stuff from the text style fixed it.