Table of Content based on paragraph style and with multiple styles of TOC

[Daniel Gibert]

I'v been testing the creation of table of content on Publisher and find it very limited on possibilities.

Maybe i'm wrong, but it seems that a TOC can only be created based on page sections, and that you can only assign a unique style to the whole table.

In wordprocessors and InDesign, table of content can and is usually generated based on paragraph styles, particularly Header styles. And you can assign different styles on the table based on what the original paragraph style is.

This is particularly necessary on reports and technical documents, where you have different levels of content that can be on the same page and that must be included on the TOC, and visually different. On Publisher you can't create subsections nor create a TOC with multiple items on the same page. Is limited to a simple section title (As you can only assign a unique section per page).

I've attached the TOC of a recent report I made on InDesign, that I can't reproduce on Publisher. On Indesign is automaticaly generated based on the paragraph styles (No need to create sections), and can create levels of content by detecting multiple paragraph styles, no problem if there are multiple instances on the same page, and also you can assign a paragraph style for each level of TOC.

Hope I'm wrong and there is something that is hiding from me, but by now, the TOC of Publisher seems only usable to simple (very) basic chapter books. Making a report TOC like the attached one will mean doing the TOC manually (ouch!)

[Mark Daniel]

I don't think there is anything in your screen shot you can't do with Publisher. There is a tutorial here that should get you started. 

[Daniel Gibert]

14 minutes ago, Mark Daniel said:

I don't think there is anything in your screen shot you can't do with Publisher. There is a tutorial here that should get you started. 

I watched the tutorial before posting and based on it is why I’m posting this. Based on he tutorial it seems that TOC is created based on sections.The TOC panel allows you to select different paragraph styles as source but there is no apparent way to assign a style to each one to be used on the TOC. As I said, maybe i’m wrong and missing something. I’ll keep trying tomorrow.

[Mark Daniel]

As it happens the TOC in the tutorial uses only one style which in that document are chapter headings but you can tick as many styles to include as you like and they can appear anywhere in the document.

About 5 mins in to the tutorial it shows all the text styles generated for the TOC in the right hand Text styles panel. This part of the tutorial could certainly be expanded upon but if you create a TOC and start editing these styles you will see you can apply all the formatting you have shown above. The styles are hierarchical so you can affect the whole TOC, entries for a particular source style and numbers all together or separately. 

[Daniel Gibert]

Thank you very much. Effectively it was difficult to see from the tutorial. And effectively I was missing something.

this is why I love Affinity. Thanks again. Tomorrow will try.

[Distill7]

You can generate TOC from any set of paragraph styles, and give them different levels, like level 1 for chapters and level 2 for subchaters.

You can assign different paragraph styles to each level of the TOC.

If you're familiar with InDesign TOC you should pick it up easily. I did it since the Beta without having to look at any tutorial.

[PhilShadow]

Hi - apologies for the newbie question, but can anyone confirm that the TOC function will ONLY work with 'Paragraph styles' and not 'Character Styles'?

 

why?

I am trying to get the TOC to pick up on particular highlighted words at the start of the sentence - by using a character style on these particular words, rather than a paragraph style (which affects the whole sentence)

eg 'the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' then shows 'brown fox' in the TOC

in this circumstance I cannot put a BROWN FOX heading before the paragraph, and creating a paragraph style produces 'the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' 

I have created a brown fox character style and selected 'show in both panels' option and it now gets picked up in the TOC, but that just seems to elevate a character style into a paragraph style - and this means whilst the source paragraph displays correctly, the TOC shows the whole sentence text

I can edit this down to the right length manually - but unfortunately any updates restores the whole sentence text to the TOC line

I am guessing that it won't work but just though I'd ask in case I have missed something

or it might be something that others would like to see included perhaps?

 

[Petar Petrenko]

On 5/31/2020 at 7:55 AM, PhilShadow said:

TOC function will ONLY work with 'Paragraph styles' and not 'Character Styles'?

Maybe the question should be:
Can TOC style keep the local character formating intact?

Well, Publisher, like Quark and InDesign removes only the local character formating if a new paragraph style is applyed or the existing is re-applyed, which is absolutelly not aceptable. There are options, with right click on the paragraph style, to keep local formatings but using it on every paragraph is annoying. When this is going to be solved, it would not be a problem for TOC styles to keep local (or character styles) formating.