TOC misbehaving

[AnthonyMarrian]

My book consists of 21 separate sections. I have a perfectly behaving table of contents (see attached "before" screenshot). However, when I add several pages to a section, delete a second section in its entirety, and update the table of contents, I get the result shown in the "after" screen shot. Notice that the TOC generation has taken a Heading 1 item (Weddings and Children) and placed a copy of it as a Heading 2 item in the preceding section. You can see this additionally for the Humanities section at the bottom of the "After" screenshot. This behaviour is repeated throughout the re-generated TOC. In addition, the regeneration is adding random Heading 1 items to the Heading 1 section in question. Notice the extraneous "Food" items in the Random screenshot, none of which exists in the text. 

The amount of time I am spending trying to overcome problems that occur in AP is really beginning to affect my view of this software.

[walt.farrell]

Is that a .afpub file you can share with us? Or would you need a private upload link so you could share it just with the Serif staff?

Or could you prepare a subset of the document, that illustrates the problem, that you could share with everyone here?

[Old Bruce]

I would hazard a guess that the Paragraph Style for "Weddings and Children" The Section in the Text is the same as the headers for the pages. Make and use two different Paragraph Styles. Name one Sections for Text and the other Section Page Header.

The Green and Red illustrate where I think you have a problem, am I correct?

If you want the Page Headers to be exactly the same formatting as the Heading in the Text then just make a new "Section Page Header" based on "Sections for Text" and change nothing except the name.

[AnthonyMarrian]

There are only three text styles: Heading 1, Heading 2, and Body text. In the example above Heading 1 is applied to the blue Weddings and children item, Heading 2 to Wisdom, Buffalo etc, and Body Text to the text (not seen here) that follows a Heading 2 item. The TOC was generated correctly originally; it was only after editing a section (with no changes made to text styles) that the re-generated TOC started producing extraneous entries (for the avoidance of doubt, all the Heading 2 "Weddings and children" entries are extraneous, and do not exist in the text). I could move the whole project into InDesign, but that would mean learning an entirely new piece of software, although, if it works properly, that might well save me time in the long run. Or, I could just create a manual TOC in Affinity once the project is finalized.

Walt, thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, I can't share the document at the moment, and I don't have the time (for now) to try to create a reproduceable example of the problem.

[Oufti]

2 hours ago, AnthonyMarrian said:

all the Heading 2 "Weddings and children" entries are extraneous, and do not exist in the text

If we look carefully at your screen capture, we can see that — beside the original, expected first entry —, "Weddings and children" appears once for each page, in the first position. 

As @Old Bruce noticed, you should look at these pages and find where that text appears. Il could well be in the header of the page, as a repetition of the Section title. If this text is set in a Paragraph style which is included in the TOC, it will be repeated for every page — as we see. 

Applying to the header a new paragraph style (not used in your TOC definition), even if that style differs only by its name from the original style, should then solve your problem.

 

(There is nothing new in my post, just reformulating what @Old Bruce said earlier, in case it was useful…)

 

[AnthonyMarrian]

Thank you Oufti. I will look more closely at this tomorrow. What is perplexing is that the problematic TOC has only occurred after some minor edits to the project, with no alteration to text style. I wonder whether version 2, to which I recently upgraded, has a slightly different method of generating TOCs. I’ll report back. 

[Oufti]

I was supposing it could have occurred after the introduction of a Running header or (Section) Name field. 

https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Pages/numberingPages.html?title=Page headers and footers

First, find where on the wrong pages is Wedding written. 😊

[AnthonyMarrian]

There are only three text styles: Heading 1, Heading 2, and Body text. In the example above Heading 1 is applied to the blue Weddings and children item, Heading 2 to Wisdom, Buffalo etc, and Body Text to the text (not seen here) that follows a Heading 2 item. The TOC was generated correctly originally; it was only after editing a section (with no changes made to text styles) that the re-generated TOC started producing extraneous entries (for the avoidance of doubt, all the Heading 2 "Weddings and children" entries are extraneous, and do not exist in the text). I could move the whole project into InDesign, but that would mean learning an entirely new piece of software, although, if it works properly, that might well save me time in the long run. Or, I could just create a manual TOC in Affinity once the project is finalized.

Walt, thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, I can't share the document at the moment, and I don't have the time (for now) to try to create a reproduceable example of the problem.

[AnthonyMarrian]

Please can I thank all those who helped me with this problem.? I have seen the error of my ways, made corrections, and the TOC is behaving (almost) perfectly. My last remaining quandary is how to arrange it such that a Heading 1 TOC item does not appear all on its own at the bottom of a page (i.e. without the accompanying Heading 2 items). Of course, I can edit it manually, but I just wondered if there was a Heading 1 / Heading 2 widows and orphans equivalent.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, AnthonyMarrian said:

but I just wondered if there was a Heading 1 / Heading 2 widows and orphans equivalent.

If every Heading 1 has at least 1 Heading 2, I would try editing the TOC1 Heading 1 Text Style, and changing its Paragraph Flow options. Try setting Keep with Next.

[AnthonyMarrian]

On 7/15/2023 at 12:06 PM, walt.farrell said:

If every Heading 1 has at least 1 Heading 2, I would try editing the TOC1 Heading 1 Text Style, and changing its Paragraph Flow options. Try setting Keep with Next.

My flow options for Heading 1 don't have a Keep with Next setting (see screen grab). However, setting the flow options of Heading 2 to "Keep with previous paragraph" seems to have sorted it.

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, AnthonyMarrian said:

My flow options for Heading 1 don't have a Keep with Next setting (see screen grab).

[AnthonyMarrian]

Thank you, Walt. I replied to you last night (from my iPhone) but can't see the message. Despite looking really, really hard, I never saw the item you've ringed; I must have been fixated on the items that can be ticked. Appreciate the clarification.