TOC Text Style confusion

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Through practice and learning your work will become more efficient.

Sure, but there is no good reason for an app to make the learning curve steeper than it needs to be. As it is, there are so many automatically generated styles, & so many different ways they can be edited & linked, that it could take hours to work out how to find which one affects only the item(s) you want it to change ... & there is no guarantee it will act the same in another document with slightly different styles.

There are seemingly simple fixes for some of this, like better naming for automatically created styles & disabling irrelevant editing options.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

As it is, there are so many automatically generated styles, & so many different ways they can be edited & linked, that it could take hours to work out how to find which one affects only the item(s) you want it to change

Really?

At its simplest, if you want to affec the TOC entries for a style XYZ you will modify either TOC #: XYZ or TOC #: XYZ Number. It's very simple to figure out which to use, in my opinion.

And it will work the same in another document.

[R C-R]

23 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

At its simplest, if you want to affec the TOC entries for a style XYZ you will modify either TOC #: XYZ or TOC #: XYZ Number. It's very simple to figure out which to use, in my opinion.

What is not simple to figure out is the impact of the various ways a TOC style can be edited, particularly when one does not take the extra step of deleting unused styles. Consider this TOC work 3.afpub file, with four para TOC 1: styles (five if you count the base 'Entry' style & six if you count [No Style]) & a similar number for char styles.

When editing any of those styles in the General section in three places you can choose any of 33 (!!!) different styles & it is far from clear what if anything will happen if one chooses some of them. It also is not easy to tell if any of them  have been changed from the automatically created defaults (perhaps by another user who created the original file).

In the same section there is a "Reset Formatting" button, but it is only available when a TOC text frame is selected, & if I accidentally use it with a 'base' style like TOC 1: Entry, it resets the entire TOC to some style, but I have yet to figure out what controls which one that will be. Besides that, if I do click the button I cannot undo that reset without either canceling the edit or accepting it & then use Undo or History afterwards.

Now consider how complicated it can get if there are multiple TOC's in the document, each with their own set of styles.

If that was not enough, there seem to be a number of glitches or inconsistencies in the UI, like when selecting a page number in the TOC the Character Style field in the context toolbar does not show anything.

[Narada]

I just don´t get the headings to be indented automatically. Why is this so? Also the feature in the TOC panel where you can choose the option to indent the different headings on severl levels doesn´t have any effect.

Here is what I wanted to do:

1. Create 1 heading and 3 sub headings.

2. Assign a different custom new style to all of them 

3. Create a TOC with all the headings and have them be indented the right way automatically like:

heading...

     sub heading 1

          sub heading 2

                sub heading 3

 

But why is it not working?