Affinity Publisher: TOC with multiple colors

[Craig Ozancin]

Over the years I have collected a number of food recipes. This week I decided to use Affinity Publisher to create recipe book. My design has the following:

recipes are divided into major cooking categories (beef, pork, seafood, and so on)

each category is started with a banner page followed by the recipes in that category

each banner page will show the category name and table of contents in that category

each recipe name will be based on an updated header2

each category name will be based on an updated header1 but will each have a unique color that represents the category (beef is red, pork is tab, seafood is blue, and salad is green)

So far everything is looking fantastic (I love the fact that you can have multiple table-of-contents based on sections)

I have a main table-of-contents at the top of the book. It lists all categories followed recipes.

Looking at how other recipe books have formatted their main table-of-contents, I have noticed that many also use the unique category color idea. However their table-of-contents see be bee picking up that unique category color. This looks much nicer that the traditional black-and-white look. I have searched through Publisher and cannot find a way to do this. Is this currently possible? If not, this would be a great feature request. Maybe a checkbox in the TOC styles to pickup the color from the reference.

[v_kyr]

You probably have to set up appropriate text styles for the different colored chapters and TOC generation ("Header 1 red", "Header 1 blue" ... "TOC 1: Header 1 red", "TOC 1: Header 2 blue" ... etc.), which are then hopefully been taken into account .

[Craig Ozancin]

Unfortunately, that makes it more effort if I decide to change the colors. For now, I am creating swatches for my colors. Before publishing, I will apply locally the colors. 

Do wish there could be an checkbox in the TOC styles to use the reference color. That way, I can change the color of each heading and regenerate the table of contents for get the changes. Oh well, wishful thinking for now.

[Craig Ozancin]

I found a solution that seems to work well. I ended up creating new header styles for each section based on header1. I set the color there. This is a slight improvement over @v_kyr's suggestion.

In my TOC, I added these additional header styles. Publisher then dynamically created the addition TOC styles. I then edited each and changed the based on to the specific header type.

Now my Table of contents is showing the different colors of the various sections.

It was a bit of a learning curve but now it is fully dynamic. I change the color at the individual header styles and the section title changes as well as the TOC. Just need to be carful not to change the TOC contents much.

[v_kyr]

That's what I assumed you have to do, when I said set up ... ("Header 1 red", "Header 1 blue" ... "TOC 1: Header 1 red", "TOC 1: Header 2 blue" ... etc.). Though I didn't tested that procedure. - Fine you got it managed.