Orphan index items

[afdojo]

The good new: I created a Publisher doc with about 250 index items. The items starting with 'A' are grouped under 'A' -- same for 'B' through 'Z'.

The bad news: Now, when I add new items, they appear before the 'A' -- like they're in some kind of null or empty or blank group. See Index and Index Panel screen shots below.

The Affinity & Apple version info is in my signature.

 

[Lee D]

Is the new text in a pinned text frame or anything like that? Can you provide a copy of your file for checking?

[afdojo]

Unless there is some easy way to accidentally pin a text frame, then the answer is no. I didn't know about pinned frames until your reply so did not pin anything intentionally.

Odds are that this is "driver error" and I fat-fingered something -- causing Publisher to assign new topics to a null/blank/empty parent. I posted this as a bug rather than a forum question because it seems (to me) like a usability problem rather than a bug-bug. I suppose there are cases where users want topics to appear in the index before the group/segments 'A', 'B', etc but I can't think of a reason why. Also, none of my many attempts to remove, rename, un-parent, etc. topics worked and I couldn't find anything in the documentation that helped.

That said, I did stumble on a fix. If you look at the screen-scrape of the index panel (above), you'll notice that the two topics "Lacebark Pine" and "Pinus bungeana" are, in fact, under a null/blank/empty parent. I finally figured out that I could click on the top line -- i.e. the blank "parent" -- and remove it. After that, adding new topics worked OK.

Sorry but I didn't save the "busted" document. My bad. I don't have a file for you to check and have no idea how to create one. Please feel free to close this problem. I guess I was hoping someone would figure out some way to make this harder to happen or easier to undo.

Thanks,

Doug

 

[MikeTO]

On 11/25/2021 at 9:09 AM, Lee D said:

Is the new text in a pinned text frame or anything like that? Can you provide a copy of your file for checking?

This bug will occur if a parent topic is blank because a blank parent topic is alpha sorted before the A-Z index headings. I duplicated the issue, have attached a test document, and a really boring screen recording showing how to duplicate it. Create an index as you normally would. Add a couple of index marks with the same parent topic. Insert the index. Edit the parent topic in the index panel and change it to blank. Presto, the index marks that have the blank parent topic will be moved above the alpha search order.

Index Test2.afpub

[afdojo]

Thanks. This is really confusing until you know the answer and then it's obvious I don't know how I managed to create a blank parent topic but at least I now know how to remove it.

Thanks!

Doug

[MikeTO]

9 hours ago, afdojo said:

Thanks. This is really confusing until you know the answer and then it's obvious I don't know how I managed to create a blank parent topic but at least I now know how to remove it.

There's no reason you'd have known why this happened but bugs like this are flashing neon signs to those who have developed software because blanks and spaces are what gets sorted before the letter A.