Trying to format tabs in TOC

[Guest]

AS a newbie to FM 9, I am struggling with trying to understand formatting TOCs

I have the TOC's Reference Page as follows:

After updating the book I get:

It's clear that the tabs characters are getting into the TOC body .... but the tab settings are not. I can tabsetting to the TOC body one at a time but aI cannot believe this is how tabs in TOCs are intended to work.

BTW I just applied the lasted FM update 9.03 ... I don't know if this caused a problem or not

Thanks

Chuck Scherl

[Shlomo Perets]

You probably don't have set tab stops defined properly in the TOC paragraph format.

I recommend setting the tab stops for the paragraph on a body page. Even though paragraph properties are global and apply equally to all page types, setting tab stops while displaying a reference page is not recommended, since the visual result may be misleading (as the column width on a reference is not the "real" column, and may be wider than the column on the body page)

After you specify the tab stop(s), either through the ruler or through the Paragraph Designer, click Update All in the Paragraph Designer (as settings related to paragraph overrides are not used when the TOC is re-generated).

Shlomo Perets

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[Art Campbell]

You're on the right track, but there's a Frame basic you haven't tumbled to yet:

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

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.