Update page numbers ONLY in Table of Contents?

[The Grey Elf]

Hi, all, 

I'm really sorry if this has been asked. I swear I've been looking for over an hour and did not find it, so if I overlooked it I hope folks won't be too annoyed with me. 

Anyway, I've just finished creating a document in Publisher and every time I have to update the ToC I have to go through and make painstaking corrections. Now that I have it just the way I want it, is there ANY way I can tell it to just update the page numbers without refreshing the entire table and sending me back to square one? I cannot find this function anywhere and the help file seems to indicate your only option is to completely update the entire TOC, entries and all. Literally all I want it to do is go through what is there, and update the page numbers without changing anything else. 

Thanks!

[walt.farrell]

Ideally you will not make manual edits to the contents of a TOC.

What kind of changes do you need to make? The intended general approach is that you accept the TOC as generated, but there are some kinds of tailoring you can do by editing the Text Styles created by the TOC processing.

If that approach is not sufficient, and you make manual edits to the TOC text, then yes, you will lose those edits when you tell Publisher to Update the TOC to get page numbers and other content updated.

[The Grey Elf]

I've done many documents with Affinity and I have yet to have a ToC generate flawlessly to where it does not need cleaning up. Sometimes a good deal of it. 

So there isn't any way at all to tell it, "Hey, just update the page numbers, not the whole table?"

That seems like a SEVERE oversight. Even WORD lets you just update page numbers without redoing the entire table, and it's just a sketchy word processing program. 

Sigh. 

Don't mean to rip into you - thanks for the help. Guess I'm down to completely redoing the cleanup on this for every tiny fix I have to make to the text. 

[walt.farrell]

Again, it would help to know what kind of edits you are making.

[Oufti]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

it would help to know what kind of edits you are making.

On my side, I find it is a pity that there is seemingly no option to retain either local or character style formatting present in the original title. I would also sometimes have some options for too long text, like what we have for the new running head…

 

2 hours ago, The Grey Elf said:

Guess I'm down to completely redoing the cleanup on this for every tiny fix I have to make to the text. 

Well, if your TOC will not change (except page numbers), that means you don't have to update this TOC, only numbers matter (that's the initial demand).

So, provided that page numbers are all aligned, well separated, on a side of the page, I could have a (dirty) trick for you: 

1. Copy your specially tailored TOC and paste it in a new frame (I suggest you place it first, for example, on the paste board outside your page).
2. 
    
3. This will create a new TOC (to avoid any confusion I recommend to rename it in the TOC panel).
4. Make the background of this frame opaque (for the example, I left it half transparent and slightly shifted).
5. Manually delete the page numbers.
6. Now, you can reduce the frame width and place it over the main text frame, leaving visible only the side of the original TOC, with the page numbers. 
7. Finally, you'll never use "update all TOC's". Always go through individual refresh, avoiding to refresh your special renamed TOC, placed above the updating one.  

 

[MikeTO]

I agree with Oufti. The main issue I have with Affinity's TOC feature is that it ignores character attributes and styles applied to headings so things like ordinals and italics are lost. You have to manually fix your TOC each time you update it. I acknowledge that this isn't technically a bug but it's a real oversight.

There are other customizations that publishers might make to a generated TOC that they wouldn't want lost such as abbreviating a heading name, an inserted manual column break to balance the TOC over multiple columns, or fiddling to make something fit.

[The Grey Elf]

Right, so the point is, there are a LOT of different customizations one might make to the formatting of a ToC that do not occur naturally in the automatic generation. Which specific ones I am making (removal of redundant entries, re-positioning chapter headers, etc.) are not germane to the fact that I have to continually do them every single time I correct an error in the documet layout that changes pagination. A simple command to "update page numbers only" should be a simple add that would be HIGHLY useful - as I said, not only can it be done in other layout software packages, it can be done in something as basic as WORD. It should be a feature in Affinity. 

[walt.farrell]

55 minutes ago, The Grey Elf said:

Which specific ones I am making (removal of redundant entries, re-positioning chapter headers, etc.) are not germane to the fact that I have to continually do them

The issues raised by @Oufti and @MikeTO are, to me, different than the ones you just mentioned.

I can envision solutions to both "removal of redundant entries" and "re-positioning chapter headers" that can be done in other ways than by physically editing the generated TOC. And for those kind of changes, handling them the other way would be a better approach because it would mean you wouldn't have to redo them after telling Publisher to update the TOC.

But thanks for those examples.

[Oufti]

7 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I can envision solutions to both "removal of redundant entries" and "re-positioning chapter headers" that can be done in other ways than by physically editing the generated TOC.

For the first one, I would for example duplicate my Header style for something like Header - no TOC (style > based on Header) and not include the latter in the TOC… 

Juggling with these two similar styles – one included in the TOC the other not –, you could also place one in a hidden frame on a page (it won't appear in the document but will be included in the TOC, in a place according to where it's pinned or placed) and the second on a different place. 

[WestCork Peter]

Just to add a +1 to be able to preserve styling used in headings when generating a TOC. For example my headings may include an italicised word that is important to preserve in the TOC when it is updated.

[thomaso]

On 8/14/2023 at 11:51 PM, Oufti said:

a (dirty) trick

Especially for edits of TOC content another (dirty) workaround could be to type the TOC relevant text twice on their according pages while the second version may vary in the text used for the TOC and gets no fill colour assigned to be invisible on the layout pages. Thus its size, position, leading, leading override, etc. and also based on / next style settings are free and might not disturb the layout. If not wanted in the story text frames it also could be placed in a separate text frame anywhere on the required page. Accordingly, the text that is meant to be visible AND in the TOC may get a separate style name but with identical definition like those headlines that get an invisible copy.

In this sample not the style of "Header" is anchored for TOC but its edited copy, styled with "invisible". The second screenshot displays in AD's wireframe/outline view mode.

[MikeTO]

Here's another workaround tip given TOC edits aren't preserved. It's common with numbered chapters to refrain from numbering the introduction but many TOC designs indent the word Introduction to match the numbered chapters below:

Introduction is formatted as Heading 1 like the chapters below but I overrode the numbering so Publisher doesn't indent it in the TOC. If I add a tab before Introduction in the TOC to indent it properly the tab will be lost when the TOC is updated.

One way to solve it is to use a duplicate Heading 1 style for the Introduction but that would clutter up the text styles list. There's a better way.

Insert a tab before the word Introduction (in the body of the document, not the TOC) and set the tab stop to 0.0001 pts. The tab will be effectively 0 so won't affect the document but the Heading 1 TOC style will display it properly because it will have the tab set to the desired indent. Note that if you set the tab stop for Heading 1 to 0 this won't work because Publisher will ignore a tab of 0. Likewise, if you type too many zeroes it will round to 0 and won't work. 0.00000001 pts is the smallest you can go and not have it round down to 0.

[Franz Rogar]

Here's a real example of the needing of such feature (just update page numbers) of mine:

Before using APub, I used Word. I published a book of miscellaneous works shorted by creation date and, for the second edition, I added two early lost short works at the beginning that an old friend had a backup miraculously.

So, in Word, I just had to click update page numbers.

Here, I'd had to:

1. Update TOC
2. Reset all titles because APub doesn't retain font features like italic, bold, crossed out, superscript... which I use frequently
3. Remove some level 4 headings for some stories that don't add anything to a TOC (mostly * symbol or similar)
4. Fix all ugly two lines widow/orphans
5. Hope there's not a 3rd edition

So, yes, I think adding an "just update page numbers" would be quite useful for novels and alike.

[lacerto]

One option would be to use cross references to heading titles as page numbers (they can be easily spotted using style filters). They would be automatically updated when the location of headings changes.