Table of contents contains all pagebreaks and margins

[bediicco]

Hello, I am desperate when creating a simple table of contents. I use H1, H2, H3, Preword, Conclusion and Appendix with my own page breaks. The table of contents takes over all the changes in its formatting, although this makes no sense at all. No matter where I try to correct that in the previous style, with a new creation it always does strange things. Is this buggy on the iPad? Or even on the desktop? I don't understand why the table of contents doesn't ignore all the breaks, because it usually doesn't have any. In addition, it sometimes creates a TOC over 40 pages across the other texts instead of generating its own pages (Even if this is written in the instructions, I wonder why it does not generally fade the text, but only here and there). It seems somehow totally buggy and unfinished - is this work in progress on iPad?

What I also don't understand is that it generally takes into account the margins that are necessary in the text, but not in a TOC. Of course, H2 must have a head distance to a paragraph, because that's how you do it, H2 has more decision-making rights than lower text. Alternatively, I would have to tell the paragraph that the last text element must have a foot distance before another element, which would not be entrusted to H2 with all rights. But in the TOC i have to manage H1, H2 and H3 again, with strange results.

So, how does the TOC in Publisher work, please? 

[MikeTO]

You can find all the information on how the TOC works in the desktop version of Publisher in my free manual. There's only one big known bug with the TOC feature in the desktop version - often when updating an existing TOC, a recently-applied formatting attribute such as Bold, Italic, or Small Caps will be applied to the entire TOC. The workarounds are to explicitly define things such as bold and italics - set them to off rather than leaving them on "No Change". But even doing this won't solve all the problems and the other workaround when your TOC is suddenly bold or italic is to click in other text, toggle Bold or Italic on and off, and then update the TOC.

7 hours ago, bediicco said:

I don't understand why the table of contents doesn't ignore all the breaks, because it usually doesn't have any.

I'm unsure what you mean so there may be a translation issue here. Do you have line breaks in your headings? If so, there is an option in the TOC panel to include or exclude line breaks.

7 hours ago, bediicco said:

In addition, it sometimes creates a TOC over 40 pages across the other texts instead of generating its own pages

The TOC feature doesn't automatically flow text across other pages. I assume you're talking about AutoFlow (Shift+click the Text Flow Out control to flow text to more pages). If that's what you're asking about, you might want to manually create the pages and frames for your TOC.

7 hours ago, bediicco said:

What I also don't understand is that it generally takes into account the margins that are necessary in the text, but not in a TOC. Of course, H2 must have a head distance to a paragraph, because that's how you do it, H2 has more decision-making rights than lower text. Alternatively, I would have to tell the paragraph that the last text element must have a foot distance before another element, which would not be entrusted to H2 with all rights. But in the TOC i have to manage H1, H2 and H3 again, with strange results.

Again, I'm unsure exactly what you mean due to the translation so could you share a screenshot of the issue?

Publisher creates the TOC text styles for us which is convenient, but sometimes the default TOC text style formatting isn't useful and you might need to edit the styles. (I know you posted about a bug with editing the styles on iPad so you'll have to update the formatting and then update the text style based on the formatting.) For example, if your headings are numbered paragraphs the default TOC formatting you'll have to add a tab stop to the TOC heading style so that the page number isn't forced to a second line. But once you have your TOC text styles set up you will never have to edit them again.

Good luck

[bediicco]

Thank you Mike

I think I can do better now, you need practice. I thought the TOC uses its own styles, but if I change the text style and then update the TOC, it also affects. As a result, it suddenly gets completely different changes and styles as it has in the TOC styles. On one hand I find this unfortunate, but on the other hand I have the feeling that it should probably be so because it is useful. It at least explains to me why my TOC behaved differently every minute. Now i know i must be absolutely clean when doing TOC work.

[Oufti]

2 hours ago, bediicco said:

[…] if I change the text style and then update the TOC, it also affects. As a result, it suddenly gets completely different changes and styles as it has in the TOC styles. On one hand I find this unfortunate, but on the other hand I have the feeling that it should probably be so because it is useful.

This is indeed the infamous bug about TOC styles changing inopportunely MikeTO said above.
Fortunately our friend provided another useful workaround you might be happy to know (if it works on iPad):

 

To repair a messed up TOC, you can also:

1. Click in the TOC
2. Select all its content
3. Reapply the text styles with the left-arrowed button on  the right of the text style name:

[bediicco]

@Oufti thank you very very much, this was exactly my bad experience for some days, but my english is not creative enough to explain all those things.

I will test the workarounds these days and test for iPad