Table of Contents confusion

[benged123]

I made one Table of Contents. It worked perfectly. But I had all the 'stories' in the wrong order. So I created a copy of the project file, deleted all the contents, then brought in the stories one by one from the original document, only now putting them in the right order.

I reset the styles on all the story headings in the new document. I try to update the TOC ... and it gives me a mess (with story headings/titles that aren't actually in the document project yet. I've deleted this TOC, tried to make a new one; but I still get the same mess. It's like there is a memory of the original document somewhere hidden that needs to be cleared (like some kind of cache).

Any suggestions on what might be happening here? And what I might do to fix it? I've included the original TOC, which worked fine right off the bat; and the new TOC, which is a mess.

[MikeTO]

There's no caching of a table of contents, it is generated from scratch each time you update it using the headings that are formatted with the styles you choose.

It's hard for us to look at this screenshot and know what's wrong since we're unfamiliar with the content. I see the blank entries with page numbers but I'm unsure why that is happening, Publisher will ignore blank lines even if they're formatted with a style used in the TOC. It would be helpful if you turned on Show Special Characters in the screenshot.

You can find what is being included in the TOC by searching for the paragraph style(s) you are including in the TOC. For example, if all of these headings are formatted with Heading 1, just use Find and Replace to find all instances of Heading 1. Perhaps you accidentally misplaced some of the headings when copying from the old document to the new one.

Good luck.

[benged123]

i think what I did, MikeTO, is: I made a page break, the next page being a photograph, and then I didn't link that page (where I'd made a page break) to the next text page (after 3 pages of photographs, with no text boxes). So there was an entire book, virtually, hidden in that text box where I made the page break. I added about 30 blank pages after the page break, then linked the page break text box to the next text box and bingo: there were a score or more of pages of text. Which I deleted. Then I linked the page break text box to the NEXT correct text box. And I redid the Table Of Contents and got an accurate read.

So the issue is, I'm assuming, that when I make a 'page break' I have to be careful to link that page to the NEXT text page.

And I re-asserted the style settings for all the chapter headings, just to make sure.

Thank you for your help MikeTO, it's super appreciated,

 

Ben