How to handle long Chapter Titles

[kareng6591]

I am just finishing assembling an ebook where long chapter titles seem to have been the root cause of much difficulty. There has been manual adjustment needed to get things to look right but not to work right. I would truly appreciate help to understand better practices for future reference.

I had to use right and left indents to center long titles over two lines, for 3 of 12 chapters. So I created a separate style for "Chapter Title 2-lines". But, the longer titles would not show up in my running footers. After creating new master pages for the longer titles, I could not solve the problem and had to manually insert a text box in the footers. Of course any change to pagination makes them switch from right-facing to left facing. Then they need to be moved across the spread. When I copied and pasted chapter titles into footers, for consistent spelling, I found that made the footers link to the Table of Contents, where multiples of each manual footer would show up. I learned to unlink them and they disappeared from the TOC. However, one of my chapter titles is still not showing up in the TOC. 

It may seem as simple as smaller title font, or shorter titles. I am trying to keep a consistent style across several ebooks, and the content is not mine, so I don't have full control of title length.

If anyone can suggest how to avoid some of the hair-pulling pitfalls, it would be much appreciated.

[Creamer Training]

I had a job where the chapter titles sometimes were very long, but the TOC entries were abbreviated. (You can substitute footers for TOC in your case.)

I put a small, non-printing text box at the top of each chapter opener. The text in the box was the abbreviated version of the title and had a unique paragraph style. This was what I used to generate the TOC (again, you can use for the footer in your case).

[kareng6591]

I'll play with your suggestion and see if I can make sense of it. Thanks.

[Barb Binder · Accepted solution]

Can you use one paragraph style for the 1 or 2 line titles, but enable Balance Ragged Lines to get the same effect that you need two styles for now? Then when you use a variables to collect the title, the footer will pick up the titles on all the pages without further work.

A TOC collects all of the paragraphs by style name—be sure the footers aren't using the same style name as the titles. 

~Barb

[kareng6591]

Hi Barb,

I'll try your suggestion too and see how it works. I'll let you know. Thanks.

[kareng6591]

Hi Barb,

So sorry for the delay in response.I am a volunteer and sometimes there are gaps between working on multiple things.

I finally got back to this issue and used your suggestions. They worked beautifully and I was able to clean up the issues with long titles, variables, footers and the TOC. 

It may be months before I work on another ebook, and could end up tearing my hair out again, not remembering what was done. You have helped me to eliminate many clumsy workarounds that could be issues in the future.

Thanks so much,

Karen

[Barb Binder]

Hi Karen:

Glad that worked for you. We'll still be here when the next project rolls around. See you then!

~Barb