TOC Sorting Glitch

[Joe Swann]

I think I have discovered a glitch in how Publisher does hierarchical sorting of TOC entries.

I am creating a book with a short TOC and then a long TOC. The long TOC lists chapter titles and topic headings within each chapter. Both have their own style assigned. In the TOC setup for my long TOC, the chapter title style is checked and set to level 0, and the heading style is checked and set to level 1.

For each chapter, there is some introductory text before the first heading appears. For those chapters where the introductory text is short enough that the first topic heading appears on the same page as the chapter title, that heading will be listed BEFORE its chapter title in the TOC. In other words, it looks like that topic is the last topic in the preceding chapter when reading the TOC. The page number is correct, it's just listed before the chapter it is actually in.

In testing this, I went to a chapter where this wasn't occurring, inserted a heading paragraph on the chapter title page, updated the TOC, and that entry appeared out of order. I repeated this test by placing a second heading on that page and it, too, appeared out of order in the TOC.

Changing the respective levels from 0 and 1 to 1 and 2 doesn't help.

I have set a preflight check comment to remind me to fix this manually when the time comes to export for publishing, but it was just by chance that I noticed this going on in the first place.

[MikeTO]

Hi Joe. Is the higher level heading in a different text frame than the lower level heading? If so, note that Publisher doesn't find headings from the top of the page to the bottom but from the bottom of the layer stack to the top of the layer stack. You can solve this by moving the frame for the higher level heading to back.

I've written extensively about creating tables of contents in the free Publisher manual that I've shared in this forum. The link is in my signature below.

Cheers

[Joe Swann]

Thank you! That fixed it. That fix never would have occurred to me.

And thank you for posting that book. I have downloaded it for reference. From perusing the TOC, it looks like you have lots of helpful info packed in there.