Table of Contents

[jas]

I am just completing my thesis proposal and using Mellel made the process much easier--except I'm having quite a time with the TOC. I just cannot format a ToC so that it looks like the perfectly formatted one shown at the end of the Mellel Tutorial "Mentions and ToC." I either get no dots or when I do insert a "doted" tab, the dots do not go all the way to the far right edge of the page. The page numbers are on separate lines. The formatting is just not correct.

I watched all the pertinent tutorials; I've search though the forum and read everything I found on formatting TOC, but somewhere I'm missing it. I am not unfamiliar with styles and used them with outer apps. Plus, I've read though the Mellel Guide sections covering Auto Titles; Paragraph/Character Styles; Table of Contents. But--I'm embarrassed to say--I just don't get it, and so I thought I'd ask for advice from advanced and experienced Mellel users.

Could someone advise me? Or, is there a step-by-step tutorial, somewhere, that can walk a person though the process of setting up a Table of Contents with the end result a TOC that looks like the one shown in the "Mentions and ToC" tutorial?

Thank you.

JAS

[este.el.paz]

jas:

I'm just posting here to punt this question onto the field, I'm interested in the answer, and if Don B is checking the forum hopefully he will try to address the TOC question. A year ago I needed to get a TOC into a book and at that time with the version I had there was either no TOC formatting or it was so complicated that I just did it the old fashioned way . . . manually typed it in. I think that Open Office has some kind of TOC formatting but it didn't read my manually set up TOC from Mr Mel. Conceivably the auto-title(s) are read to create a TOC but in my book I also gave up trying to get the AT to work, thus forcing me to do it the old fashioned way . . . .

Hopefully Don can point you/us in the right direction; now I have the latest version of Mr Mel and maybe sometime in the next year will be on to another book and it might come in handy.

e.e.p.

[rpcameron]

JAS,

One of the problems that I've had when doing a TOC with Mellel seems to stem from a long-standing bug in the program. If you set a right-aligned tab (and a leading with a dot, if you like), if you set the tab stop at the edge of the paragraph (so, if the page has 1" margins, and you don't have any indents in the paragraph style you are using, then you the right edge would be at 7.5"), it will force itself to the next line.

The only way I have found to work around this is to set the tab stop a little before the paragraph margin (7.499" in the above example). If someone else has a workaround that works better, I would love to hear it. However, this is the only way I have found to get around this. If this is not a bug, then I would love to hear a good reason why it works this way. Otherwise, this is one of the most annoying bugs in a word processor that I have ever faced, and I believe it's been with Mellel since day 1 IIRC.

[redlers]

I am just completing my thesis proposal and using Mellel made the process much easier--except I'm having quite a time with the TOC. I just cannot format a ToC so that it looks like the perfectly formatted one shown at the end of the Mellel Tutorial "Mentions and ToC." I either get no dots or when I do insert a "doted" tab, the dots do not go all the way to the far right edge of the page. The page numbers are on separate lines. The formatting is just not correct.

I watched all the pertinent tutorials; I've search though the forum and read everything I found on formatting TOC, but somewhere I'm missing it. I am not unfamiliar with styles and used them with outer apps. Plus, I've read though the Mellel Guide sections covering Auto Titles; Paragraph/Character Styles; Table of Contents. But--I'm embarrassed to say--I just don't get it, and so I thought I'd ask for advice from advanced and experienced Mellel users.

Could someone advise me? Or, is there a step-by-step tutorial, somewhere, that can walk a person though the process of setting up a Table of Contents with the end result a TOC that looks like the one shown in the "Mentions and ToC" tutorial?

Thank you.

JAS

JAS -- I cannot tell from your description what the problem is exactly. Let's assume, for our purpose, that you want to create a ToC with dotted line all the way to the right of the page.
For this, I've created a dummy document with a few auto-titles and generated a (poorly looking) ToC. This is the result you'll get with the default template.



When examining the default ToC I may encounter one of two situation: either the style is not set properly (e.g., the style used with the ToC does not have a decimal tab with a Dot lead at the right end of the page), or the ToC itself is improperly generated (e.g., it doesn't have a tab entered after the title).


This is how the style should be set, for example.

You can either edit the style (in the ToC you've generated) and save the changes to the style and/or edit the ToC format. Let's assume you suffer from both problems - you fix the style as seen above, and save the changes to the paragraph style.

Now, to edit the ToC format, you press the Edit Setup in the Auto-title palette and then click the ToC format tab.



As you can see here, the Level 1 heading does not have a Tab following the title element. You can place the insertion point right after the Title element and add a tab from the Elements pop-up:



You can repeat this for every other level, but selecting the level and editing the ToC format. Now, when Generating the ToC once again, you get the result you wanted:




To explain how this works more generally:
A. You can set the ToC format via the Edit Setup > ToC format, including selecting the paragraph and character style you'll be using with the ToC (you can select it directly from the Character or Paragraph style palettes).
B. You can generate a dummy ToC, edit it as it should look, and then save the changes to the paragraph and character style. You can then apply the styling to the ToC as in A and then re-generate it.

[ozean]

Thanks for the thorough explanation – I was looking for any hints in your post to see if the behaviour that rpcameron describes is acknowledged as being a bug. I haven’t found any clues to answer this question, but I would also emphasize that needing to place the tab marker before the page margin is making life very hard. If you have to work with document that have different margins, this quickly becomes very troublesome, because you always have to make changes to all styles that put tabs at the outer margin.

It would be really wonderful if this could be fixed in a future version of Mellel!

[jas]

Been out of the loop for a couple of days. Thanks so much for your responses. It looks like i have some work to do. Here's what I get. Almost there. The margin issues has me a bit puzzled. I appreciate your instructions. I will follow them step by step and see how it comes out.

[writerguy]

@jas: To align to the right the page number:
1) Add a "reverse tab" dragging it from the bunch of tabs and place it at the right of the ruler (it looks like you have a regular or indent tab, instead) in your Title style.
2) With the tab previously selected (it's blue when selected) choose your preferred tab lead (dots, on Margins & Tabs palette).
3) In the "Edit title flows" section, select your Title level (left list), then "ToC format" and
4) In the blank space, insert a tab before the "Page#" element. The reverse tab will fill the space with dots or whatever you've selected.
5) Probably you will have to repeat these steps for every Title style.

If everything it's Ok, you will be rewarded with a nice formatted ToC!

It took me AGES to figure out how to do this (and yes, I read the Guide), still no 100% confident in tabs, alignments and styles things (it's not very intuitive).

Good luck!

[ozean]

Here's what I get. Almost there.

It looks like you have mutliple tabs set in your paragraph style. In addition to those at the very beginning of the line, there should only be one tab (a reverse tab), located at the outer page margin. I guess you will have to delete all those tabs in the middle.