Contents list in AF Publisher 2.3 going crazy

[charlesbewlay]

I went to update my Contents list. First screenshot shows a section with Positioning and Transform shown on the right. All as it should be. As according to the TOC par a Styles/
Then I click on update and I get screenshot 2. Leading Override and Vertical scale have decided to go mad with increases. And this is the final proof of my book!!

Affinity guys I need help here. This should not happen. I just wasted two hours trying to find a solution.

[MikeTO]

Hi Charles. There are two possibilities that come to mind.

There's a known bug with updating the TOC - the last formatting that was set, even if it was hours ago, will be applied to the updated TOC.

For example, if I format a word as Italic and then update the TOC, the TOC will be updated as Italic. I'm very aware of this now so when I make something Italic, or apply a character style, and plan to update the TOC, I then apply the same thing to another word and then apply no italic or No Style before updating the TOC.

The other possibility is that the widely-spaced TOC is the way your TOC text styles are defined, and updating the TOC will always revert to those styles and erase any formatting you've applied to the TOC. This is not a bug and is the way it should work. You can check if this is the problem by reapplying TOC 1: Heading 1 to a heading 1 TOC entry and seeing if it changes, and doing the same for TOC 1: Heading 2. The secret to formatting a TOC is to only edit its text styles and to never apply formatting manually.

If it doesn't sound like it's either of these issues, you may need to upload a sample for review.

There's lots of information on creating and formatting tables of contents and editing text styles in the free PDF manual for Publisher I've shared in the forum - the link is in my signature below.

Cheers

[charlesbewlay]

MIke, what a stunning reply.

I'm not sure of all the steps I went through, but certainly the problem seems to be a delay in updating. So restarting the app and the Mac both seem to have chuntered things along. Now any change I make works immediately: the whole problem has gone away. The page numbers look correct now – there'd been some cases of putting in the left-facing page (old InD problem!).

The only thing I'd like to do now is reduce the page numbering size. It's using the caps size, not the lc of the words themselves. I tried taking the first letter to lc but that made no difference. It makes them look very big.

I've been using your stunning manual for a bit, but didn't see anything on that numbering size, even in the latest update. Your manual is stunning, as I said and am glad to repeat. I just love the formatting, the detail, the links; everything! I've never seen one as good, and I hope you get some reward for it. I'd happily pay you something for it.

Apols for responding a bit late: time zones partly – I'm at GMT-2, and its a Sunday so family calls. And no notifications too.

Charles

[MikeTO]

4 hours ago, charlesbewlay said:

The only thing I'd like to do now is reduce the page numbering size. It's using the caps size, not the lc of the words themselves. I tried taking the first letter to lc but that made no difference. It makes them look very big.

If you're using small caps then yes, the numbers will match the capitalized characters and not the lowercase small caps characters. To reduce the number size you'd have to edit the TOC 1: Heading 1 Number (or Heading 2 Number if it's for heading 2) and change the font size yourself.

4 hours ago, charlesbewlay said:

Your manual is stunning, as I said and am glad to repeat. I just love the formatting, the detail, the links; everything! I've never seen one as good, and I hope you get some reward for it. I'd happily pay you something for it.

Thank you. I've written these before when I was actually getting paid, and no need to pay me for this one, I wrote it for fun.

[charlesbewlay]

Greetings Mike, I hope you've had a bit of a break and enjoyed Christmas.

Your tip on page number sizes in TOC worked great: I hadn't seen a separate style! So then I embarked on creating an index for the first time. It's been quite an adventure – Publisher is tremendous for this I have to say.

There's only one snag, and thats to do with See/See Also. Every time I add one, all the entries with those styles, para and character become widely spaced with leading override as (13pt). As per screenshot.

This is set as 13pt in the Index Cross-reference Label character style and in the  Index Cross-referenced Topic character style. The only way to fix this is to manually set the leading override as 13pt, for each See/See Also entry.

So I'm baffled. Any thoughts?

Charles

[MikeTO]

5 hours ago, charlesbewlay said:

Greetings Mike, I hope you've had a bit of a break and enjoyed Christmas.

Your tip on page number sizes in TOC worked great: I hadn't seen a separate style! So then I embarked on creating an index for the first time. It's been quite an adventure – Publisher is tremendous for this I have to say.

There's only one snag, and thats to do with See/See Also. Every time I add one, all the entries with those styles, para and character become widely spaced with leading override as (13pt). As per screenshot.

This is set as 13pt in the Index Cross-reference Label character style and in the  Index Cross-referenced Topic character style. The only way to fix this is to manually set the leading override as 13pt, for each See/See Also entry.

So I'm baffled. Any thoughts?

Click in the "See Also" part of the index text. The character style should now be "Index Cross-reference Label". Check that Text Style panel "Current Formatting" summary at the top of the panel and see what it says. It should be "Index Entry 1 + Index Cross-reference Label + [No changes]" or something like that. If it includes "Leading override" then we'll come back to that in a bit.**

If it doesn't include Leading Override, then edit the character style and see if it specifies a leading override. If so, this is easy, just delete the leading override and you should be fine.

Next click in the index topic words you are cross referencing, for example, click in "dictionary" in "See also dictionary". The character style should now be "Index Cross-referenced Topic". Again, edit the character style and see if it specifies a leading override. If it does, clear it, too.

**If the text styles don't include a leading override but there's a leading override applied to the "see also" text as shown in the Current Formatting summary, then this is probably similar to the TOC bug where previously-applied formatting is "picked up" when the index is generated. This happens all the time with TOC generation. You can avoid it by editing the index text styles and defining the leading override to the same value as the paragraph leading. So if your paragraph leading is 12 pt, just set character leading override to 12 pt.

Good luck

[charlesbewlay]

Mike, I just realised I didn't thank you for all that. With the Index I ended up just doing some manual stuff as the rest didn't seem to work for me.

Thanks very much for all.