Apub indent TOC?

[kat]

Whats the trick to getting top line flush left and lines after indent? The Tab Ruler is no help

[MikeTO]

I've never seen that before so I don't know what to suggest. Is it possible that you've accidentally formatted it as centred rather than left aligned? This could happen if it was centred. 

[walt.farrell]

With the cursor in the line, the Context Toolbar will show you the name of the Text Style you need to edit. And the Paragraph Spacing settings in that Text Style should explain what you're seeing.

[kat]

In this short short video it shows I should be able to use the ruler, but when I try no top arrow.  I tried looking it up in @Alfred's Affinity Publisher manual, but couldn't find though I got tons of finds. I used to do 2nd line and hanging indents all the time in InDesign.

 

[walt.farrell]

19 minutes ago, kat said:

In this short short video it shows I should be able to use the ruler, 

For text that is not using a text style, yes. The TOC is controlled by text styles, and you should adjust them to make changes.

[kat]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

The TOC is controlled by text styles, and you should adjust them to make changes.

Where in text styles?

[MikeTO]

11 hours ago, kat said:

Where in text styles?

Click in the TOC and you will see the TOC text styles in the Text Styles panel. I believe I've listed them in my manual and explained what they do. For example, TOC 1: Heading 1 aligns to your Heading 1 style.

Good luck

 

[walt.farrell]

11 hours ago, kat said:

Where in text styles?

In the Spacing options, if that's what yoou meant:

[kat]

Here is how indent to here is done in InDesign. Is it possible to use a negative # in APub?

[Alfred]

11 minutes ago, kat said:

Here is how indent to here is done in InDesign. Is it possible to use a negative # in APub?

Set the ‘Left’ indent to a larger value than the ‘First Line’ indent.

[bbrother]

2 hours ago, kat said:

Here is how indent to here is done in InDesign. Is it possible to use a negative # in APub?

@kat If you're asking whether it's possible to have a negative value in the [First Line Indent] field in the spacing section of the "Paragraph" panel, then no.
APub does not allow negative values in this field. If you enter a negative value, it will be automatically corrected to 0p if you use picas or 0mm if you use milimeters as document units.

The equivalent for what you have on your screenshot (InDesign) in APub will be↓

[kat]

Finally got it.

I suppose hanging indents are impossible where an asterisk or # hang outside of the text frame.

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, kat said:

I suppose hanging indents are impossible where an asterisk or # hang outside of the text frame.

That might be possible using the Optical Alignment settings, but I haven't tried it with those specific characters or in a TOC.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

That might be possible using the Optical Alignment settings, but I haven't tried it with those specific characters or in a TOC.

Yes, optical alignment works in a TOC and you could hang an asterisk outside the frame. You couldn't add space to the right of it and have the space outside the frame, too, though because optical alignment is limited to a single character. I'm unsure what TOC design this would achieve. @kat, could you share a picture of what you want?

[kat]

You can set negative #s in Paragraph>Decoration, there is an indent checkbox. Possible there is a way to put an asterisk outdented there. I need to learn more on this. Really interesting.

[kat]

I still can't get my TOC to give me indents when I shift return for a 2nd line. Plus everytime I update my TOC 2nd line indents get wonky.

I've attached a single page with the TOC with wonky 2nd line indents. Problem is obvious though you can't update as nothing to update to.

Thanks for you patience.

TOC trouble.afpub

[MikeTO]

You can't add line breaks to a generated TOC without them being lost when you update the TOC.

If there are line breaks in the actual headings, you can choose to retain them in the TOC by deselecting the "Remove Line Breaks" checkbox in the TOC panel.

If you just need line breaks because a couple of headings are too long for your TOC design, this is a flaw in Publisher and you'll need to do it manually. For every book I publish in every app I've ever used, I always have a checklist of last-minute things to do before I export to PDF. For my Publisher manual, I have one heading that is too long for the TOC design and which breaks badly so I have to enter a manual line break in the TOC. I know it will be lost when I next update the TOC but it's the best I can do given the way Publisher works.

For example, see how Publisher (left) wraps the "AutoCorrect" heading in my TOC compared to how Microsoft Word (right) handles it. Publisher breaks the line after the tab whereas Microsoft Word always breaks before [corrected] the tab, creating a perfect dot leader. This is probably the way it was designed but it feels like a bug since I can't think of any other app that works this way so I'll report it in the bugs forum.

 

This is a somewhat rare case, if I reworded my heading so that it was shorter it would fit, or if I reworded it so it was longer and a word wrapped to the next line then it would have a proper dot leader. It's just these in-between cases that are an issue.

Edited April 18 by MikeTO
corrected in red

[MikeTO]

Posted in bugs forum:

[bbrother]

14 hours ago, kat said:

You can set negative #s in Paragraph>Decoration, there is an indent checkbox. Possible there is a way to put an asterisk outdented there. I need to learn more on this. Really interesting.

@kat Paragraph → Decorations as the name suggests, this is used to create decorations (left, top, right, bottom borders and fill), usualy to differentiate text blocks.
It is great for, when you want the apperance of a "pull qoute', or for coloured heading fill or underline. But it is not used, nor it can't to outdent punctuation characters like *.

Making punctuation marks like * outdented, what you're asking for, i think it's is called by pro typesetters a "Hanging punctuation" or "Exdentation". It's a microtypographic technique of typesetting punctuation marks and bullet points, most commonly quotation marks and hyphens, further towards the edge so that they do not disrupt the ‘flow’ of a body of text or ‘break’ the margin of alignment. It is so called because the punctuation appears to hang in the margin of the text and is not incorporated into the block or column of text.

That will be all when it comes to the theory.

In my opinion, "Hanging Punctuation" is best used when the text frame is fully with text, when there is no room to breathe between words (example bellow↓)
But I'm curious why you would want to use it for TOC? like you suggested earlier in this thread.

In APub it's quite a simple matter to make hanging punctuation.
This is typically done at the text style level (without manually selecting the character itself) in the Character → Optical Alignment section.
You can also do this at the character level (apply alignment to selected characters rather than to text style) by using the Character panel instead.

The whole procedure is simple:

1. In the Character → Optical Alignment section, change Type to 'Manual'. 
   This invokes all the listed alignment rule presets, plus any added custom optical alignment rules.
2. Click "Add" to add a new rule.
3. Edit the rule.
   Left — is used for the percentage of the character to be outdented at paragraph's Left Indent or tab stop.
   Right — is used for the percentage of the character to be outdented at paragraph's right Indent or tab stop.
   100% means the whole character's width will be outdented
   Characters — The character to be optically aligned. The character you type in your paragraph that matches this character will be automatically aligned.

I hope this helps you a bit with the topic of outdenting *.
BTW @kat, I'm not a professional typesetter, I am a ful stack web-dev that likes to learn new things.😄

[Old Bruce]

15 hours ago, kat said:

I've attached a single page with the TOC with wonky 2nd line indents. Problem is obvious though you can't update as nothing to update to.

Each entry has a host of overrides applied. One of which is for the paragraph alignment, it is overridden to be Centred.

[kat]

Amazing @Old Bruce it was simply centering. Found it on top menu but not in paragraph style; is it there?

What is the arrow with lines under it and a P symbol on the right side? Nothing happens when I click it 

[MikeTO]

Centred is what I asked in my first reply. You can set it in Paragraph Style by clicking Spacing on the left and choosing Centre from Alignment.

[bbrother]

36 minutes ago, kat said:

Found it on top menu but not in paragraph style; is it there?

@kat This is not a top menu but context toolbar for text frame.
The context toolbar always updates to show the options available for the currently selected tool.

 

1 hour ago, kat said:

What is the arrow with lines under it and a P symbol on the right side? Nothing happens when I click it

This button (marked in red rect in above screenshot) is used to update paragraph style.
When you make some changes (overrides) in paragraph it is used to update the paragraph style to include those changes.
The mere fact that it is not dimmed, i.e. disabled, means that there are some overrides in the paragraph.

Am I right @MikeTO, or maybe I mixed something up?

 

36 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Centred is what I asked in my first reply.

That's right, you nailed it in the first reply post👍.

 

[Alfred]

18 minutes ago, bbrother said:

This button (marked in red rect in above screenshot) is used to update paragraph style.
When you make some changes (overrides) in paragraph it is used to update the paragraph style to include those changes.
The mere fact that it is not dimmed, i.e. disabled, means that there are some overrides in the paragraph.

It would be good if a brief message were to pop up when you use it, rather than leaving the user to think that

1 hour ago, kat said:

Nothing happens when I click it

 

[Oufti]

25 minutes ago, Alfred said:

It would be good if a brief message were to pop up when you use it, rather than leaving the user to think that

2 hours ago, kat said:

Nothing happens when I click it

Like this?

Description:

I applied Italics to a paragraph, so the button highlighted to show something was changed from standard definition of the style, and after clicking on this button — with the popup message stating that it will update the style, according to where the cursor is placed —, all the paragraphs sharing this style are then set in italics. Once the style is updated, the button is greyed out. 

 

[Edit: I don't know why the video does not start from the beginning… 😲]