Unexpected ToC ordering - how to fix?

[Alex White]

I've got a page with two frames - the top frame has an H1 heading in it. The lower frame has two H2 headings.

In the ToC which is generated, the two H2 headings appear higher in the list than the H1 heading - not what I want at all!

I suspect that this is because I created the frame with the H2 headings and the body text first. The top frame with the H1 heading and the blue text was created second (and isn't part of the text flow, because I needed something to cross columns).

My question is - how can I tell the ToC to look at the top frame before the bottom frame? Is there any kind of text frame ordering that I can use? I've been through the menus and can't see anything obvious!

Thanks

 

[Alex White]

Solved it!

It turns out that it is the Layers which controls this - in the attached picture I have a top frame near the top of the list of layers. If I drag it down to just above the master page, then this sorts out the ToC ordering.

 

Cheers

Alex

[Old Bruce]

Thanks for posting your solution, a lot of people fail to do so.

[kaiz3r]

hello, i have the same problem and ordering layers doesn't change anything, any reason for this ? any other way to force the order ?
i think it's quite messy. we should not have to do anything to make it's works properly. the TOC should scan the doc from top to bottom, no matter layers order or something

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, kaiz3r said:

hello, i have the same problem and ordering layers doesn't change anything, any reason for this ? any other way to force the order ?
i think it's quite messy. we should not have to do anything to make it's works properly. the TOC should scan the doc from top to bottom, no matter layers order or something

Ordeing the layers properly should resolve the problem, but without seeing your document, or at least screenshots of the TOC and of the page(s) where the problem occurs, including the Layers panel showing the relevant Text Frames, we won't be able to provide much help.

Basically, the TOC will be ordered from first page to last. On each page, the entries on layers closer to the bottom of the Layer stack will appear in the TOC before entries from layers higher in the stack. Pinning text frames within other text frames may also affect this (I have not experimented enough with that).

The idea of trying to do it based on visual appearance on the page is an interesting one, but that's not how it has been implemented, and changing the implementation (if possible) would be incompatible with existing documents, which would complicate matters significantly.

[garrettm30]

6 hours ago, kaiz3r said:

hello, i have the same problem and ordering layers doesn't change anything

Have you updated the TOC after changing the order of the layers? They do not self-update dynamically.

[Alex White]

7 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

Have you updated the TOC after changing the order of the layers? They do not self-update dynamically.

I love the fact that the pre-flight checks window gives you a one-button ‘fix’ to update TOC.