Having Issues Creating TOC in FrameMaker 2017

TOC formats live in the Reference Pages. If you create a book, the first time that you create a TOC it's going to pick up styles/references pages/etc. from the first file in the book (I'm 95% sure of this). Copying TOC files from another book is fine, I guess, but if you have different tag names in your new book, then the underlying styles for the TOC for the old book (which are located in the Reference pages) will have no effect.

Personally, for each book that we maintain, I create a "master file" with all styles, tags, page formats, etc. If I create a new book that has new styles, I just go to the master file of another book, copy out the TOC reference page content, and then retag it accordingly in the new book.

Hi Rachel:

The first time you create a TOC, FrameMaker will create a new, unformatted list for you by collecting text from the source files and adding them in chronological order. In addition, FrameMaker will create paragraph tags for you based on the tags in the source files.

For example, if you ask FrameMaker to collect all of the paragraphs tagged Heading1Mid, the text will appear in the TOC—unformatted—but tagged as Heading1MidTOC. You will need to format the first occurrence of each tag in the Paragraph Designer and update the style to update the other occurrences. You will also need to head over the reference pages to replace the default spaces in front of the page numbers with tabs. If you aren't sure how, see Adobe FrameMaker: Adding Tabs to a Table of Contents - Rocky Mountain Training.

If you want to reuse the formatting from a previous TOC with the same tag names in the source file and the same formatting in the TOC:

1. Import the formatting via File > Import > Formats or
2. Follow the instructions shown here: Adobe FrameMaker: Reusing a TOC or Index - Rocky Mountain Training

~Barb

Not sure what the question is - is the data that's being displayed wrong? If so, then your TOC para tags are probably not set up correctly. If it's the formatting, then there's the old TOC trick that you generate a TOC (ugly looking), close that, rename it outside of FM, copy in a nice looking TOC, rename it so that it's called the same as the new book's TOC, then reopen FM and Update the book - your TOC should look great and have the correct data in it.