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Barb Binder
Community Expert
Barb BinderCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 16, 2017
Answered

TOC question—Adding leading letters to running heads and TOC

  • May 16, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 1198 views

I am stuck on a student question...

Her client wants to add letters to the running heads to indicate chapter subjects. For example, Chapter 1 might be on Safety, so page numbers should be S–1, S–2, S–3. There is nothing to grab from the page, but easy enough with user variables. Chapter 2 might be on Transportation, so page numbers should be T–1, T–2, T–3.

But then she wants that same numbering in the TOC, and I'm hitting a wall. What am I missing?

~Barb

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Correct answer Stefan Gentz

That should work by adding the prefix (like "S-") in the document page numbering options. Or by adding the chapnum building block to the page number variable.

1 reply

S
Stefan GentzCorrect answer
Legend
May 16, 2017

That should work by adding the prefix (like "S-") in the document page numbering options. Or by adding the chapnum building block to the page number variable.

Barb Binder
Community Expert
Barb BinderCommunity ExpertAuthor
Community Expert
May 16, 2017

Thanks Stefan for your super-quick reply. It turns out I misunderstood the question—she generates a TOC for each chapter with the letters, so she can just add them to each TOCs reference pages. (Phew!)

At this point, they don't need to be included on the TOC for the entire book. But if they did (because that's still on the table), I'm still missing something—if I change the prefix to S-, I can get the running heads and the TOC to work correctly with the <$chapnum> building block, but then the Chapter 1 changes to Chapter S-!

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
Bob_Niland
Community Expert
Bob_NilandCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 16, 2017

I'm doing something sort of like this in a current project. A major book section is alphabetic by topic.

  • Anchored to the lead item at each first use of the next letter is an at-insertion-point one-row high Anchored Frame
  • with a Text Frame within it
  • containing run-in ¶ formats, in small point sizes, in a color to be set Invisible at render by Color Views

These ¶s can be picked up by RH/F, TOC, IX, LOx or whatever. It's a kludge, but it works reasonably well, and is more apparent to the document maintainer than, say, RH/F markers.

I further use those same meta text frames for text which acts as hypertext source targets (basically Xref by $MarkerText, something FM has needed for only 20 years or more). Every use of certain terms and phrases in the entire book is an Xref to where the topic is discussed or defined. This can't be done as normal Xrefs due to wanting to have instances of lc, Lcap, Icap, verbose and terse variants of the topic to link to.

The intended workflow is PDF, where I'm not terribly concerned about the metas still being present, and paper. I have no idea how this would render to HTML or eBook formats.

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