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jondeere89
jondeere89
Participant
July 22, 2019
Answered

Table of Contents blank

  • July 22, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 2707 views

I'm so confused. I have an academic catalog I'm working on that I update once a year with new courses, professors, etc. It is in a book with 18 documents. For some reason when I try to update the table of contents this year it just gets wiped out. It goes from a 5 page table of contents to nothing. No overset text. It's as if InDesign doesn't see any of the 4 paragraph styles the TOC is supposed to pull in, but I went through and made sure that there are. I could use any help on this.

Here are several screenshots for reference.

I usually consider myself at a somewhat advanced level in InDesign, but it could be something simple that I'm missing, so any ideas are welcome!

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer jondeere89

I might have figured it out. I did not have all the documents open when trying to update, and when I opened them all it updated. I could have sworn that i didn't need to have them all open to generate the TOC, but I guess I do. Thanks for the help, though!

3 replies

jondeere89
jondeere89AuthorCorrect answer
Participant
July 23, 2019

I might have figured it out. I did not have all the documents open when trying to update, and when I opened them all it updated. I could have sworn that i didn't need to have them all open to generate the TOC, but I guess I do. Thanks for the help, though!

Barb Binder
Community Expert
Barb BinderCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 23, 2019

Hi jondeere89 :

Normally, you don't need them open to update the TOC.. The exception if they were saved in an earlier format (i.,e.,  you are working in InDesign 2019, but the chapters were saved as 2018). Opening the files will save them to the current format. Could that have been the issue?

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
jondeere89
jondeere89Author
Participant
July 23, 2019

OK, so I'm not crazy! They would have been saved in an earlier format, but I had updated and re-saved them all I thought. It's possible one didn't have any edits and didn't get re-saved... but I synched them all to make sure all my styles were right, so that should have done it. I don't know. It might have just been a bug that finally worked itself out.

    A
    a.yalda
    Inspiring
    July 23, 2019

    As Barb said it is normally just that the style names don't match up. If the styles are fine, there are a couple of possible scenarios that I know of:

    1. If you have more than one InDesign Book file open InDesign may not know what book to generate from.

    2. If your TOC style is not set to "Include Book Documents" it won't generate from the book.

    3. If the document you are generating from is not in the book (e.g. if it is a new unsaved document that hasn't been added to the book file yet).

    4. A TOC can't generate from text that is generated from a TOC. Therefore, an individual document has a TOC and the publication has an overall TOC that should generate from the individual TOCs, it won't generate at all. This is pretty rare, but has happened to me once or twice.

    Hope this helps.

    Best regards, Adrian

      Barb Binder
      Community Expert
      Barb BinderCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      July 22, 2019

      Hi jondeere89

      It's normally blank because InDesign can't find any matching styles. Would you mind opening the first chapter in the book and showing us the Chapter Title style in the Styles panel?

      ~Barb

      ~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
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