Table of contents out of order

[acajohn29]

Hi everyone,

I'm reorganizing my first book from scratch and have put a dozen or so chapters into the order I prefer. Strangely, on page 36 I have two "Heading" sections, one Heading 1 and one Heading 2. In spite of being physically organized in that order, the Heading 2 section appears first in my TOC, (under a different H1). I removed the second heading and replaced it and nothing changed. Please help me get the order correct, it's perplexing and seems to defy logic.

Thank you,

John

AAiA.2023b.afpub

[walt.farrell]

As with many things in the Affinity application, the order of layers in the Layers panel is important, and objects that are lower in the Layers panel stack are assumed to have been created first, just as brush strokes painted directly on a canvas were made earlier than the strokes painted on top of them.

So, in this case, as "La Crisis" is lower in the layer stack on that page than "Sex in Public", it is assumed to have been created first. And thus it appears earlier in the ToC.

You could move "Sex in Public" into the same Text Frame as "La Crisis", which would fix the problem. Or, if there's some reason it needs to be a separate Text Frame, you could (I think) Pin it to the front of the "La Crisis" text. But simply moving the text into the Text Frame would be easiest.

[acajohn29]

Thank you, Walt. I appreciate your quick response and help. Will do.

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome.

[walt.farrell]

Another simple fix: Just drag the "Sex in Public" Text Frame below the "La Crisis" Text Frame in the Layers panel.

[acajohn29]

Thanks, easy!

[Joansz]

On 5/7/2023 at 4:04 PM, walt.farrell said:

Another simple fix: Just drag the "Sex in Public" Text Frame below the "La Crisis" Text Frame in the Layers panel.

I tried that and it didn't work. I'm on Publisher 2.3. I'm surprised the software doesn't default to the latest move and not the earliest.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Joansz said:

I tried that and it didn't work. I'm on Publisher 2.3. I'm surprised the software doesn't default to the latest move and not the earliest.

We would need to see your TOC and the Layers panel for the page whose text is out of order in the TOC.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Joansz said:

I tried that and it didn't work. I'm on Publisher 2.3. I'm surprised the software doesn't default to the latest move and not the earliest.

Hi, could you describe the problem you're having in more detail?

Publisher generates the table of contents based on the text styles you choose to include. The order of the TOC will be the order of the included styles in your text frame. If there is more than one frame, it will start at the bottom of the layer stack and work its way to the top.

Ensure you have selected the right text styles to include in the TOC panel.

Cheers,

Mike

[Joansz]

4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

We would need to see your TOC and the Layers panel for the page whose text is out of order in the TOC.

TOC:

Page: Layers:

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for the screenshots, @Joansz. As you can see from the Layers panel, "Yorkist Bishops" is below "The Princes in the Tower" in the Layers panel. That means that (in the normal order of creating items on a page) that you created it first, and therefore it appears first in the TOC. You need to switch the layer order, in the Layers panel, of those two items to match the visual appearance on the page.

As with several other aspects of the Affinity applications, this is all based on painting on a canvas. You start with a blank canvas, and an empty layer stack. You paint a stroke, and it is on the bottom of the layer stack, touching the canvas. If you paint another stroke that crosses the first one, it is physically above the first stroke, and is above it in the layer stack. Thus, the items created earlier are lower in the stack. And that order determines order in the TOC in this case. In other cases, it would determine the order that Artboards are exported as pages in a PDF, and other aspects of how the Affinity applications work.

[Joansz]

9 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Thanks for the screenshots, @Joansz. As you can see from the Layers panel, "Yorkist Bishops" is below "The Princes in the Tower" in the Layers panel. That means that (in the normal order of creating items on a page) that you created it first, and therefore it appears first in the TOC. You need to switch the layer order, in the Layers panel, of those two items to match the visual appearance on the page.

As with several other aspects of the Affinity applications, this is all based on painting on a canvas. You start with a blank canvas, and an empty layer stack. You paint a stroke, and it is on the bottom of the layer stack, touching the canvas. If you paint another stroke that crosses the first one, it is physically above the first stroke, and is above it in the layer stack. Thus, the items created earlier are lower in the stack. And that order determines order in the TOC in this case. In other cases, it would determine the order that Artboards are exported as pages in a PDF, and other aspects of how the Affinity applications work.

Yeah--it worked. I thought I had done that, but I guess not. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome.

[JeffKontur]

I totally understand the bottom-up approach, but there are instances where changing the layer order could also change the visual layout of the page. At that point, it becomes a matter of:

1. Maintain the integrity of your layout and accept that some TOC entries will be in the wrong order.
2. Ensure the TOC entries are in the correct order but compromise on your page layout.
3. I suppose you could create a duplicate HIDDEN layer that appears on the TOC while the real (visible) layer looks like a normal heading but actually isn't.

All of these options are just workarounds to a very clunky feature of the software. There are several better ways it could be implemented. This really needs to be in a future update.

[MikeTO]

3 minutes ago, JeffKontur said:

I totally understand the bottom-up approach, but there are instances where changing the layer order could also change the visual layout of the page. At that point, it becomes a matter of:

1. Maintain the integrity of your layout and accept that some TOC entries will be in the wrong order.
2. Ensure the TOC entries are in the correct order but compromise on your page layout.
3. I suppose you could create a duplicate HIDDEN layer that appears on the TOC while the real (visible) layer looks like a normal heading but actually isn't.

All of these options are just workarounds to a very clunky feature of the software. There are several better ways it could be implemented. This really needs to be in a future update.

Changing Publisher to generate a TOC from top to bottom of the layer stack would break everybody's existing TOCs, PDF anchors, not numbers, etc. I really hope this never changes.

 

[JeffKontur]

Why could it not be a selectable option? Or make the TOC behave in such a way that one could drag (or use some other method to place) items to the desired order within the TOC but independently of the document content?

The latter would be a lot more complex to code and implement, but a checkbox to choose the order in which page layers are read seems simple enough.

[walt.farrell]

39 minutes ago, JeffKontur said:

, but there are instances where changing the layer order could also change the visual layout of the page

And in that case, you would need to make an alternative change, rather than simply moving the layer. 

[MikeTO]

39 minutes ago, JeffKontur said:

Why could it not be a selectable option? Or make the TOC behave in such a way that one could drag (or use some other method to place) items to the desired order within the TOC but independently of the document content?

The latter would be a lot more complex to code and implement, but a checkbox to choose the order in which page layers are read seems simple enough.

The layer order affects not just the TOC and visual appearance but also the order of notes (footnotes, sidenotes, endnotes), PDF bookmarks, and global numbered lists. I can't imagine Publisher having separate options for each so an option would likely have to affect all of them.

I came to Publisher used to top-to-bottom sorting, too, and it took me a few days to reverse that part of my brain, but I now prefer it because it makes a bit more sense since this is the way objects are printed and rendered.

The bigger issue that trips people up is they expect objects at the top of the page (with a lower Y coordinate) to be sorted before objects at the bottom of the page. They don't understand the layer stack at all and want it to work visually. This would make for a very interesting feature request but it would be complex to code and could have performance issues because text might need to be flowed multiple times as list and notes are numbered.