Export to PDF and TOC-paragraph question/issue

[RobWu]

Hi,

This one is slowly getting to me now after several tries to fix it...

I have a brochure with some basic pages, some text styles and a separate TOC page. So far so good.
Chapter headers are a separate text frame/style apart from the text frame paragraphs. No text flow between the two.
When exporting the brochure, the PDF comes out fine, and I have perfect pages and a nice page thumbnail list.

But when I look in Edge at the List view for the TOC, or in Firefox at the Document Outline (same thing, different name), I see my chapter headers listed, but -also- all my text from the following text frames. So imagine a looong list, instead of just the chapter headers.
I also tried to create the chapter headers as a artistic text, but with the heading textstyle attached it does the same thing in the export.

I looked at my all my text styles, document and export settings, but cannot seem to find out what is causing this?
I probably overlooking something very basic here.

edit: oh... Win 11 and Publisher 2.3.1 MSIX

Anyone has a tip or idea?
cheers!
Rob

[walt.farrell]

Sounds like you may have the Chapter Header text style assigned to additional text that should have some other style, but usually that would cause obvious issues in the document itself.

Can you create a sample .afpub file, by copying the current file, then deleting most of the text and just keeping a page or two, and create the same problem? If so, if you can share that sample with us we may be able to diagnose it easier than by guessing.

[RobWu]

Hi Walt,
That might be the best route to go here. I'll prepare a file later today for peeps to have a look at.
Like I said, I probably am doing something wrong style wise, or overlooking some other setting.

I'll be back....

rob

[RobWu]

Hi Walt,

After some more ideas popped up in my head, I did some extra testing before sending out a file.
It looks like the copy/pasting text from OneNote had some weird side effects in Publisher. Or it seems like that?

First I fiddled with the existing content and styles on the brochure, even deleting/rebuilding text frames and TOC. But still gave me weird results in the PDF TOC, like double chapter headers etc. There was some more fiddling, but I won't bore you with that....

But after this testing with the styles, text frames and text, I reverted back to the beginning and tried just completely redo the current text in the existing text frames for one chapter.
And just to remove all traces of formatting, I used Notepad to strip it all down within the route from Publisher and Notepad v.v.
After pasting the original flattened text back, and re-applying all the styles, the PDF TOC finally shows me just the chapter list.

In the brochure, the text blocks in the other chapters that are not replaced/fixed this way, the PDF TOC result is still the same with chapter and text in one 'block'.
So it is really has something to do with the previous pasting of text out of a OneNote Notebook.

Now I know what -more or less- is going on, I will rebuild the rest of the pages doing the same thing.
Although it's a bit of pages already, re-doing the text as stated above will still be fixed fairly quickly.

Or if this sound familiar, any tips are welcome to avoid this in the future. 

rob

[walt.farrell]

I would need to see a sample with the problem in order to understand the details, but it seems like you've found a solution that should work. If you decide to share a sample I can take a look to see if I can explain what was happening, or perhaps someone else will have some ideas.

[RobWu]

Just to finalize this one...

It ended up being an issue with the anchors in the document.
Some were old anchors that were still being 'there' after changing a heading title.

As this was explained to me:
Create a heading 1 title named Apples. Generate the TOC - you have an anchor named Apples.
Edit the heading 1 title and rename it to Oranges. Generate the TOC - now you have an anchor named Oranges but you still have an anchor named Apples
That is a known bug for Publisher apparently.

The other issue was some weird copy/paste issue between OneNote and Publisher, generation lots of anchors for the imported text paragraphs.
These anchors showed up in the anchors panel, and were easily deleted after I knew where to look.

Hope it helps someone when they run into the same 'shenanigans'.

rob