TOC for book partially breaks bookmarks

[DutcherR]

Hey there.

I'm working on a large book consisting of several chapters. Off course the first InDesign document contains a table of contents and it does correctly display all chapters from the other documents. However, when exporting the bookmarks / hyperlinks in the TOC are all broken for any link that is not within that InDesign document. I.e.:

<doc 1> TOC; TOF; TOC; Chapter 0;

<doc 2> Chapter 1; C1.1; C1.2; C1.2.1; C1.2.2;

<doc x> ....

<Table of contents displays>

TOC          <OK>
TOF          <OK>
TOC          <OK>
C0           <OK>
Chapter 1    <LINK BROKEN>
   C1.1      <LINK BROKEN>
   C1.2      <LINK BROKEN>
      C1.2.1 <LINK BROKEN>
      C1.2.2 <LINK BROKEN>
Chapter 2    <LINK BROKEN>
 ....        <LINK BROKEN>

This happens on the Table of Contents as well as my Table of Figures and Table of Tables. So I assume it is more structural. Does anyone have an idea what could be causing this?

Thanks in advance,

[Mike Witherell]

Did you also check ON the easy-to-miss "Include Book Documents" in the ToC generator dialog box (where the documents are open and also the book file)?

[DutcherR]

Yes, 'Include Book Documents' is enabled (just verified). Visually they are also present in the TOC, all hyperlink references just refer to #page 1 (i.e. the start of the document) instead of the page on which the linked paragraphs are located

[DutcherR]

Well... so your question spurred me to recheck some things and it turns out that I need to enable 'make text anchor in source paragraph' for hyperlinks to work as well. No idea why it originally worked for the internal document, but not for others, but it seems to have fixed my issue 😄

Honestly, I've had this problem for over two weeks and I've asked around inside the company I work at, but nobody seems to know what could be causing it. One of the many challenges when an external party supplies a template you are not familliar with... At least it's fixed now, at last 🙂

Thanks for the speedy reply and assistance. 

[Mike Witherell]

What OS version? What version of InDesign patch?

Did you experiment with washing the INDD files out to IDML and back?

[Mike Witherell]

Re-checking obvious things is always a smart move!

[Randy Hagan]

Are you, per chance, running multiple tables of contents?

I've previously run across similar issues when running separate tables of contents for books (e.g. - one for chapters, one for technical illustrations/tables/photographs, etc.). Creating and placing multiple tables of contents is easy, provided you leave the Replace Existing Table of Contents check box unselected.

In the layout/text context, running multiple ToCs appears seamless. But there's a lot of metadata work that happens in the background that seems to get scrambled hopelessly for other contexts. At its most basic, the only problem you'll have is that the last ToC you run within InDesign "wins." However, it can also scramble things from previously built ToCs like PDF bookmarks and other text tagging for electronic publication.

I haven't found a "fix" for that, but I have had success with a work-around. The last ToC I run is for the most prevalent function (generally, the book chapters) and then I double back and check all the bookmarks within the book through the Bookmarks panel (accessible through the Window>Interactive>Bookmarks menu command) and clean up/replace any anomalies I find independently from the ToC automated bookmarking functions.

In short, with multiple ToCs, I can't — and don't — rely on InDesign's automatically generated PDF bookmarks functions to get me what I may need, and find that I have to rely on my own attention and skills to get the results I want. Wish I had better news for you, but this is the best I've got.

Hope this helps,

Randy