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I went to update my Contents list. First screenshot shows a section with Positioning and Transform shown on the right. All as it should be. As according to the TOC par a Styles/ Then I click on update and I get screenshot 2. Leading Override and Vertical scale have decided to go mad with increases. And this is the final proof of my book!! Affinity guys I need help here. This should not happen. I just wasted two hours trying to find a solution.

A bug in Publisher v1 and v2 causes the table of contents (TOC) layout to go berserk when refreshed because it sponges up unrelated character/paragraph styles from the document. During a TOC refresh, the update function superimposes whatever character or paragraph style is used last in the document on top of the actual TOC styles. This should never happen since Publisher uses independent TOC styles to generate a TOC. For example, if I apply a red character style somewhere in the document and then proceed to refresh the TOC, the entire table of contents will turn red. The same goes for paragraph styles. If I apply a numbered list style somewhere in the document and then go to the TOC to reload it, every TOC entry will start with a number. The TOC only sponges up style settings which are undefined in a TOC style (or its ancestor's TOC style) but defined in the last used document style. With undefined settings I mean unchecked settings or [No Change] settings, anything that can inherit a value. So if I explicitly set the base TOC style to use black text, the unrelated red character style can no longer affect my TOC layout. This workaround works but is impractical for documents that use numerous styles. Since any of these could affect the TOC at some point, you'd need to overrule quite a few settings. Luckily, there's a more suitable workaround, albeit a bit silly. Workaround: Make sure nothing in the document is selected. Go to the Text Styles panel. Set the Paragraph and the Character style to [No Style]. Click somewhere in the TOC to make it active. Refresh the TOC from the Table of Contents panel. The TOC now exclusively uses TOC styles. This behaviour must be a bug. I can't think of any reason why this would be a feature. It appears that forum user Loquos experienced the same issue last November, so I'm pretty sure it's not my setup at fault. Steps to reproduce the problem: Create a new document. Place two regular text frames on the page. From the Table of Contents panel, insert a TOC in frame one. Add a few lines in frame two and apply the default Heading 1 style to each. Go to frame one and refresh the TOC. Edit the TOC style 'Base' and disable the tick mark next to the text colour setting (character fill). Type some text in frame two. Add a new character style and set its text colour to red (character fill). Apply the red style to the text you typed in step seven. Update the table of contents in frame one. The new character style colours the contents red, even though it is entirely unrelated to the TOC layout. When I tried to reproduce the bug in a new document, I noticed that even though the Base style for the TOC is based on [No Style], it is far from empty. Almost every setting in the Base style has a default value. This explains a lot. I tend to defenestrate the default styles when I create a new document. My styles only have values for the settings I need. They don't have default values for unused style elements. This likely caused these daft TOC layouts, but that's beside the point. My approach should've worked just as well. After all, a TOC should never sponge up settings from a random document style. It doesn't make sense, but it is what's going on. I'm using macOS 12.6.3 and the latest Affinity Publisher (2.0.4). I always use the Table of Contents panel to update the TOC. I did not try the Preflight panel's TOC update feature. Hardware acceleration does not affect the issue. Neither does it help to unplug all external hardware. The problem exists in both Publisher v1 and v2. It would be great if the Affinity team could look into this peculiar behaviour and hopefully fix it! Thank you!