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Table of Contents from multiple documents


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I am producing a book which is divided into numerous files (in order to keep the files manageable). I want to product a TOC and an Index but there doesn't seem to be a way of compiling and TOC when I have more than one file. Is there a way to achieve this with Affinity Publisher short of compiling a TOC for each file then combining them?

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Multiple TOCs in one document are certainly supported.

And in theory if one had multiple .afpub documents, each with its own TOC, and merged them, the TOCs could survive. However, I suspect that this would only work in practice if the style names were unique in each document. That is, if:

  • Document 1 used style names like Doc1Header1, Doc1Header2, etc.
  • Document 2 used style names like Doc2Header1, Doc2Header2, etc.
  • etc.

because the TOCs in Publisher are completely driven by the paragraph text styles assigned to elements.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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Yes, we can have multiple TOCs in one document but I don’t know of a way to combine TOCs from different documents into a single TOC. I’ve never tried your method so I can’t comment.
It might be possible to have a separate ‘TOC document’ which contains a linked PDF from each of the individual documents but that might be awkward to create and maintain (I’ve never tried).
As for combining indexes, I don’t think that’s possible as the entries would have to be merged somehow.

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8 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

Parts can have same style names (and preferably should ...

Not can, not preferably but Should or even Must. It is just good sense and you will save yourself many, many headaches when you compile the multiple documents together. Make a template with all the styles you will need and base each document on those styles, if you make changes in one then you have to import and replace the styles in each document.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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This is something that needs to be included in the next version of Publisher. The book I'm working on is 248 pages full colour and one file would be over 100 Mb. This would result in the program crashing, as it did when I had one file of 30Mb. I've had to split it into 18 files. 

All the designers I work with prepare files like this so we need to be able to compile a TOC and Index from all the separate .afpub files.

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