An alphabetical Table of Contents

[Hilltop]

Is there a simple way to render an alphabetical TOC?

[MikeTO]

18 minutes ago, Hilltop said:

Is there a simple way to render an alphabetical TOC?

Sorry, no. This has been requested before but there's no way to do it.

If you're only printing your document, you can copy the unsorted TOC text from the front of the document to another program, sort it there, and then paste it back into Publisher. But if you're exporting to PDF and want clickable page numbers that would break the links.

[thomaso]

Alternatively you might want to use an index for alphabetical order.

https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/index.html

[Hilltop]

9 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Sorry, no. This has been requested before but there's no way to do it.

If you're only printing your document, you can copy the unsorted TOC text from the front of the document to another program, sort it there, and then paste it back into Publisher. But if you're exporting to PDF and want clickable page numbers that would break the links.

Too bad. Hopefully, it will be added in the future.

So, I did as you suggested in Word. The only thing was that I couldn't get the entries, the leading periods and the page numbers to nicely line up as in the original TOC. Is there some way to do that, if you know? 

The book is basically for print, so clickable page numbers are not essential but wouldn't it be possible to manually add links?

9 hours ago, thomaso said:

Alternatively you might want to use an index for alphabetical order.

https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/index.html

You can only create one index in Publisher and I already used it for that purpose.

[thomaso]

1 minute ago, Hilltop said:

the leading periods and the page numbers to nicely line up as in the original TOC. Is there some way to do that, if you know? 

With Character > Baseline Shift you can move selected characters up/down within their lines. With Find & Replace you might select the wanted chars.

[Hilltop]

3 hours ago, thomaso said:

With Character > Baseline Shift you can move selected characters up/down within their lines. With Find & Replace you might select the wanted chars.

I may not have made myself clear. I was talking about each line in the TOC -- with the chapter, the leading periods following it and the page number at the right margin -- filled and justified, so that it looks like an auto-generated TOC. 

[thomaso]

14 minutes ago, Hilltop said:

the chapter, the leading periods following it and the page number at the right margin -- filled and justified

Aren't they all attributes of your text style(s) and defined there?

[MikeTO]

The dot leaders should be defined in the original TOC text styles but when you paste everything back in from word it was likely all pasted back in as one style, perhaps as TOC 1: Heading 1, and perhaps even with the TOC 1: Heading 1 Number character style applied on top.

You'd need to manually re-format the sorted text from Word, applying TOC 1: Heading 1 (and Heading 2) as required, and applying the Heading 1 Number as required. Take a look at the "before" TOC and compare it to where you are now.

More information on how to create dot leaders for TOCs is included in my manual in the "Formatting a Table of Contents" section under "To add a dot leader".

Cheers

[Hilltop]

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

Aren't they all attributes of your text style(s) and defined there?

Duh! Yes, of course!

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

The dot leaders should be defined in the original TOC text styles but when you paste everything back in from word it was likely all pasted back in as one style, perhaps as TOC 1: Heading 1, and perhaps even with the TOC 1: Heading 1 Number character style applied on top.

You'd need to manually re-format the sorted text from Word, applying TOC 1: Heading 1 (and Heading 2) as required, and applying the Heading 1 Number as required. Take a look at the "before" TOC and compare it to where you are now.

More information on how to create dot leaders for TOCs is included in my manual in the "Formatting a Table of Contents" section under "To add a dot leader".

Cheers

I was overcomplicating things but am back on track again. 🙂 

Edit: Actually not since I don't know how I can have the TOC text style show as the converted text is no longer a TOC.

[Hilltop]

Update: I discovered a little trick. I connected the text frames of the regular TOC with the manual TOC and selected one line of the former and all lines of the latter in order for the TOC text styles to appear. Then I applied the desired text style to the manual TOC, cut it, disconnected the text frames and pasted the TOC back in place. Looks perfect now.

Thanks again for your help guys as it moved me into this direction!