TOC Anchor Links, Hyperlinks & Starting Over With Every Change

[JakeMacgill]

Hello all:

I'm putting together a cookbook with lots of recipes. I'm having an issue with the table of contents. 

In the process of finishing this book, I've made tweaks that impact the table of contents. Every time I refresh the toc, all of my hyperlinks to my anchors disappear and I'm back to square one formatting over 300 recipes again and again. This is incredibly frustrating and time consuming. Am I doing something wrong? It would be so much easier if I knew enough to write a macro that would automate the steps for each recipe. Is there a way to refresh the toc so that I don't have to go through this process for every minor change? 

[walt.farrell]

Perhaps if you explain what changes you are manually making to the TOC one of us could come up with an alternative suggestion for you that doesn't involve making manual changes. Because if you make manual changes to the TOC, and then refresh it, you will lose the changes.

Providing a small sample .afpub file would also be helpful.

[JakeMacgill]

Thank you for your prompt reply, Walt. On a weekend no less. It is much appreciated.

I am sending this book out initially as a .pdf file, and after I figure out how to format my file into ebook format(s) I will send it out in those formats. Because it is going to be a digital file I have made every section page title and every recipe title an anchor in my document. In the toc I am selecting each line with the name and page number and formatting them as anchor links, sending the user to the associated anchor. 

I am doing this manually. I haven't yet discovered any other way of doing this within the program. If the program is able to do this already, I would very much like to know how to set that up. Otherwise, I will continue to do this manually so that my family can zoom to the recipe they want on whatever device they are using to follow these recipes. 

I hope this explanation is clear enough to avoid having to package a snippet of recipe book with enabled links. I'm tired, discouraged and fighting several issues with my document. This is the biggest issue for me right now. I'm working to get this out before Christmas--as a gift. If there is a way to get the program to do this for me, I'd be over the moon. 

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for the explanation, Jake. That's what I thought you might mean, but if I understand you then you shouldn't need any manual work for the PDF version.

Every item in the TOC is automatically a hyperlink to the page for the text that generated the TOC item.

[JakeMacgill]

That's good to know. How do I export to .pdf to have that available? I exported to test the links and there was nothing. Is there a specific .pdf option I should choose?  I'm using a PowerMac laptop, if that makes a difference. 

Thank you very much for walking me through this. I hope you are already enjoying the holidays.

[walt.farrell]

37 minutes ago, JakeMacgill said:

That's good to know. How do I export to .pdf to have that available? I exported to test the links and there was nothing. Is there a specific .pdf option I should choose?  I'm using a PowerMac laptop, if that makes a difference. 

Thank you very much for walking me through this. I hope you are already enjoying the holidays.

You're welcome, Jake. And yes, we've been enjoying this holiday season, with lots of virtual concert events to watch. (But it would be more fun if we could do some of our usual end-of-year travelling safely.)

Any PDF format that is not for printing should have have the hyperlinks enabled automatically, I think. But my recent test was using the "PDF (for export)" preset. You can look in the More dialog during Export to see if hyperlinks are enabled or not.

 

[JakeMacgill]

Brilliant! It worked. Now I have some other issues to deal with and this will be ready to send out. Thank you!!  

The concerts sound like fun . . . armchair concerts with snacks included.

I wish for you that next year you can safely travel. We are all hoping that the vaccinations and further precautions will help to make the world safer in that regard. Some of our children are in Hawaii for the holidays and had to pay for expensive testing--the test accepted by Hawaii--in order to travel there. We live in a different world now.

Here's hoping Santa brings you what you most wanted this year. 🤞

 

[walt.farrell]

Thanks, Jake.

And you're welcome; glad it's working for you.