TOC does not recognize paragraph/heading levels in Word document

Question

We are in the process of linking our Word documentation (Word 2003) to RH 8 and we're having a lot of trouble with the TOCs. Our manual consists of 150+ single documents, each one of course structured into various hierarchical levels. In the end, we would like to obtain a global TOC for all of the single chapters/documents and the only solution we could find is to create separate TOCs for each document and to merge these in the end to one global TOC for the entire manual. Using any other method, like having RH create a TOC automatically results in the TOC displayed in the format of bookmarks (with underscores, no "special" character recognition etc.), totally inacceptable!!!

Now, we also discovered that RH does not properly recognize the hierarchical levels of the linked Word document, RH creates headings of let's say level 3 as pages of a parent book which is also level 3. Looks like the following:

(Book) Chapter 3.1.1

(Single Page) Chapter 3.1.2

(Single Page) Chapter 3.1.3

(Single Page) Chapter 3.1.4

Our Word document has been formatted correctly and likewise our original TOC in the Word document, in which we're using our own format settings and our own .dot Word template, and the levels have been assigned correctly throughout the documents.

Is this a bug? Tried to solve this problem by restructuring and reassigning formats within various Word documents but without success! And of course we cannot be forced to edit the TOC manually after each update of the Word document which will be doing frequently that's why we chose RH and this Word document linking method to avoid manual reediting steps.

Hope someone can help us

Always ready to provide additional info where my explanations might be unclear..

Thnx for replies!

natee_li

natee_li · Answer

I might have found the possible explanation for this problem:

We have divided let's say chapter 5 of our manual (Word document) into separate single subchapters, i.e. separate documents, each of them starting on the second text level, e.g. 5.1, 5.2 etc. I guess that's the reason because when I added the heading of the level 1 at the beginning of each document and in the Word TOC accordingly, RH 8 recognises and structures the levels correctly. Unfortunately we are forced to "drag" the child books beneath the top level book in the RH TOC one by one to the global TOC if we want to maintain our old overall TOC structure.

But it works...

What we are very unhappy with is the fact that we cannot update our global TOC in RH automatically: We are constantly updating our documents and we would wish for a method where we could not only update each Word document via RH and the respective single TOC along with it but also the overall TOC merging all the single document TOCs. Because as soon as we have to reedit a single document TOC manually we cannot use the TOC placeholders. Haven't found or heard any good solution yet

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