Publisher Table of Contents formatting. How can this be achieved? Plus: BUG

[Helmar]

Below you  will see a  TOC formatting in one of my (many) books. In order to get the page numbers right-aligned, I need a TAB in front of them. However, when the TOC is generated or updated, it messes it up because the manually added TAB is being removed in the process. Is there any way to avoid/prevent this? (NB: the vertical line is accomplished via an indented "decoration")

And: there is a "bug"  in Publisher as I cannot select ONLY the TOC contents and do a search&replace on it. Publisher searches the entire document, although only the TOC is selected. That brings us to another missing feature.... search&replace in only the selected text. Or have I just missed it somewhere?

TIA,

Helmar

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, Helmar said:

However, when the TOC is generated or updated, it messes it up because the manually added TAB is being removed in the process

If you edit the generated TOC by hand then yes, your changes will be removed if you update/regenerate the TOC. You need to make your changes via the TOC panel or by editing the TOC Text Styles via the Text Styles panel.

2 hours ago, Helmar said:

there is a "bug"  in Publisher as I cannot select ONLY the TOC contents and do a search&replace on

That is a missing feature, not a bug. You can add your voice to one of the requests in the Feature Requests section of the forums 

There is a workaround, but it's a bit complex and involves adding some "marker" text before and after the area you want to restrict the changes to, and then incorporating the marker into a Find string for a regular expression operation. I'll dig out an old post about that later.

[walt.farrell]

Found it more easily than I expected:

 

 

[Helmar]

Thanks, Walt, much appreciated! The funny thing is that I constantly use that search and replace using regex in other documents, and I even used it in AFP. So thank you for the heads-up, because that will make it much easier in the future.

Ideal, of course, would be an additional feature that allows prefixing certain elements, because then - as in my case - each style would start with a TAB, making the regex search&replace unnecessary.

Cheers,

Helmar

[walt.farrell]

41 minutes ago, Helmar said:

because then - as in my case - each style would start with a TAB,

That is something you might be able to handle in the TOC panel, and that's where I would start.

If you provided a sample document someone might be able to show you how.

[MikeTO]

Whether or not to left or right align numbers after a TOC entry is a design choice, but numbers before entries should always be right aligned so I think it's reasonable to consider this a bug. I mean, who would want a TOC that looks like this? But regardless, it would be nice to see this changed or at least an option provided.

 

Adobe InDesign has the same flaw, it left aligns numbers before entries and everybody complains and uses difficult workarounds.

Also, the help system is missing an explanation of two of the TOC panel features - if you click the menu icon to the right of a style name you can choose to exclude the page number. I thought Affinity lacked this feature until just now so I was pleased to find it, but it really should be documented. This is also where you go to control the indent level.