TOC Problem from a Newbie

[danmorrisonline]

I'm having trouble with my TOC. All the content appears on a single line in a jumbled mess. I thought I might have made a mistake when creating my tags, but they all work fine in other places in the book (cross-references, page and chapter numbering, and variables).

Any ideas about what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Dan

[Art_Campbell1]

Well, to start off, you're not providing much information to the forum about what you are doing.... so it's hard to make suggestions.

It would be helpful if you could describe your environment: OS / FM level / networked or local files / working in a multi-file book or a single file outside of a book.

Second, what, exactly, are you doing to create, then set up, and finally to generate the TOC?

***

The Reference page of the TOC determines the +content+ of the TOC -- what is actually included as far as text strings from headings, tab stops and so on. Including line breaks.

But the paragraph tag for each heading that's used in the TOC -- probably something like Heading1TOC -- determines how that content is formatted. I suspect that you set this up on the Reference page using the paragraph format window, but you clicked Apply rather than Update All. Apply set the tab stops for the tag you were working on, but did not ripple the changes to all tags of that name in use. So open the Paragraph designer again, verify the tab stop settings and click Update All this time. Save the TOC file. Then update the book again.

Cheers,

Art

[danmorrisonline]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Sorry for not giving enough information--I warned you I was a newbie!!

I'm using FM 9.0p250 with 64-bit Vista on a Q6700@2.66GHz with 6GB of RAM. There are multiple files in a book. All files are local.

With the book panel open, I click Add/Table of Contents. In the Set Up Table of Contents dialog box, I select the two tags I want to include (chapter_title, and head1), and then click Add. The TOC is then auto generated by FM with everything appearing on a single line. I have not done anything in the Reference Pages, nor have I adjusted any tags.

Am I incorrectly adding a TOC to my book?

Dan

[AxialInfo]

Dan, it does sound like you're correctly adding the TOC, yes.

What Bernd is suggesting is that the paragraph style for each of the tags in the TOC is somehow getting the "run-in" setting applied to it, so that all the paragraphs are piled up on top of each other.

To check this, what I would do is:

1. Turn on the text symbols (in the FM menus, choose View > Text Symbols) so that you will eventually see the ends of the lines correctly. For the time being they'll be all jumbled, of course.
2. In the TOC, move to the bottom of the file, so that you see the end of flow symbol (the double-SS character, like this: § ) Use your arrow keys and arrow to the right as far as you can, to be sure you're at the end of the flow.
   
3. Hit "enter" so that you create a new empty paragraph. It should be one of the two paratags that you selected, for example it would be head1TOC.
4. Open the paragraph designer and look at the pagination properties, in particular for the setting int he "Format" area. Is the bullet for "Run in Head" selected?
   
5. If it is selected, then change it to "In column", hit apply, and then it Update all.
   
6. Do the same for the chapter_titleTOC paragraph tag.

Let us know how you get on  --

Sheila

[Art_Campbell1]

Dan,

As Shelia stated, yes, you are following the correct procedure to add a TOC.

One quick question here, because of the newbieness:

It's normal for all TOC entries to be in a single column, one entry to a line, without formatting. When you're saying all entries flow together on a single line -- that's a little odd. So to clarify, all entries appear to be in a single line, correct? So that there's an entry, a page number, another entry and so on flowing just like this text...

Not like this:

entry     page

entry     page

That's correct?

If so...

Working with the paragraph formats as Berndt and Shelia suggested is what you need to do to fix things.

But you can also do a quick reality check to make sure the TOC is generating OK and something else isn't broken. Open one of the TOC files from your template directory.

In your generated TOC, do File > Import > Formats and specify the Template TOC as the source.

When you do this, it should impose a correctly formatted TOC structure on your raw material. You don't have to save it, of course, but it will tell you -- and us -- if the problem is in your formatting or somewhere else.

Cheers,

Art

Art

[danmorrisonline]

Thanks, again, for the great responses. Here's what I discovered:

The format was set to In Column. Even setting it to Run-In did not give me the same "one line" result I was getting.

Art, I tried your suggestion of importing my template, but I still got the same "one line" error. But. . .

In working through all the suggestions you guys made here, I discovered that no matter what template I used for the TOC or what paragraph tags I used when generating the TOC, all of the Indents and Spacings were getting set to 0 when the TOC was generated. I was able to separate all the lines by adjusting these settings.

I'm sure I must have been doing something wrong to make this happen, but I don't know what. Any ideas? -- so I can learn from my mistakes.

Thanks again. Even though I didn't understand everything you guys were suggesting, by slowing working through your ideas I was able to get this project finished.

Dan

[Art_Campbell1]

Dan,

Based on what you said, particularly the point about importing formats not fixin the problem, I'm beginning to suspect that somehow the TOC file is being corrupted.

So at some point, do a SaveAs to MIF, the FM ASCII format. Open that file and then SaveAs over the original FM TOC file.

Just for reference, the template used for the TOC is based on your existing book component files, so that may be the source of the weirdness, but it's hard to tell what's hinky long distance.

[Be.eM]

danmorrisonline wrote:

All the content appears on a single line in a jumbled mess.

Dan,

beyond all the things Art wrote: maybe you've defined your TOC paragraph formats as a "Run-in" paragraph? This would explain the single line.

Bernd