Should bullet points in text come through to TOC entries?

[GarryP]

Windows 10 Home 1909, Publisher 1.8.2.620.

When the items I want to put in a TOC have bullet points, those bullet points come through into the TOC and cause the formatting to be messy.
See attached image and AFPUB file.
Is this expected behaviour and, if so, how can I stop it?

toc-entries-with-bullet-points-from-text.afpub

[Murfee]

Hi Garry, you need to go to the tab stops section of the TOC text style, add another stop and adjust spacing as needed, in the screen shot I chose the leader character for this one rather than the left stop which puts them between the bullet & the text.

 

 

[GarryP]

Thanks Murfee.
Adding an extra tab stop does make the formatting better but I’m asking if the bullet point should be in the TOC entries or not.
My headings, in this case, are the texts “Title One” etc, and the bullet points aren’t part of the headings – just how they’re displayed – so I was wondering how I can get rid of them, or whether they should be there in the first place.
(I can also add a bullet point to the TOC style and now I have a ‘double bullet’, which doesn’t seem right.)

[Murfee]

1 minute ago, GarryP said:

My headings, in this case, are the texts “Title One” etc, and the bullet points aren’t part of the headings – just how they’re displayed

They are, if you look in the text style for Title One it is Heading 1, this has a bullet set under bullets & numbering, if you don't want it change to no list in this section

 

[Murfee]

6 minutes ago, GarryP said:

(I can also add a bullet point to the TOC style and now I have a ‘double bullet’, which doesn’t seem right.)

I had problems with Hierarchal Numbering when they changed the way numbering was handled in TOCs in 1.8, I kept ending up with double numbers, nearly drove me mad 😂

[GarryP]

I want to see the bullet in the text but I don’t want to see the bullet in the TOC.
In other words, I want to be able to display the heading in the text with a bullet while having the same text in the TOC without the bullet.
Or to put it another way, the bullet isn’t in the text I entered so I don’t want to see it in the TOC.
I can't ever remember seeing a bullet point in a TOC entry. (I might not have a good memory but I've checked a few books and can't see any.)

P.S. I’ve just opened an existing document where I had everything nicely done with numbering, updated the TOC, and it’s all wrong now (attached image). Aargh! I’m going to have to mess around with it more now.

[walt.farrell]

15 minutes ago, GarryP said:

I want to see the bullet in the text but I don’t want to see the bullet in the TOC.

So, update the TOC text style and remove it.

Seriously, I'm not sure whether carrying the bullet over into the TOC text style should be the default, or not. But if I had to guess what the majority of users would prefer, they (like you and I) would probably not want the bullets to carry over.

(On the other hand, I don't see a use for bullets in headers at all, personally, so I fail to understand why you want them in the first place   But that's your call, for your document.)

[Murfee]

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

So, update the TOC text style and remove it.

 

You can't remove it now Walt, well I can't on a Mac, if it is there in the main document text style heading it will pull through to the TOC...whether you want it to or not. I wouldn't want bullets to pull through but I do need numbering to pull through, the changes in 1.8 have made this more complicated than it was in 1.7

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, Murfee said:

You can't remove it now Walt, well I can't on a Mac, if it is there in the main document text style heading it will pull through to the TOC...whether you want it to or not. I wouldn't want bullets to pull through but I do need numbering to pull through, the changes in 1.8 have made this more complicated than it was in 1.7

Interesting. I'll need to do some more playing, I guess. Thanks.

[GarryP]

If the answer was as simple as just removing the bullet from the TOC style then that’s what I would have done but I can’t. Even setting it specifically to “No List” doesn’t have any effect.
Plenty of documents have bullets at the start of some headings – usually only for major sections, rather than every heading (see attached image) – so it’s not particularly unusual.

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Plenty of documents have bullets at the start of some headings – usually only for major sections, rather than every heading (see attached image) – so it’s not particularly unusual.

Thanks.

I've never considered those as bullets when I've seen them; merely decorations. But I can see that treating them like bullets would make the setup easier, unless one had a program with better capability for paragraph decorations than Publisher has today.

It does seem odd that explicitly setting the TOC style to No List doesn't work. I think you should report that as a bug.

[GarryP]

I can (sort of) do what I want with decorations – with some difficulty getting things the same everywhere (this part of the software doesn’t seem to be as rock-solid as I might want), but it’s much easier to just use a bullet.
From what Murfee has said above, it sounds like the developers could have deliberately changed how the software works so I can’t say if it’s a bug or just the new way of working. Personally I don’t like the current way as it doesn’t look like I can format the numbering in the TOC differently to the text in the TOC. It’s nice that the numbering can come through – if I want it to – but to be forced to have it (and in the same formatting) is, in my opinion, worse than it was as it’s not as flexible as is was.