Re Moving to Mellel from MS Word TOC question

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hha1911
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Re Moving to Mellel from MS Word TOC question

Post by hha1911 »

Hi All,
I am very interested in moving from MS Word to Mellel to produce my dissertation. However despite looking at the Manual, the Tutorial and the Forum I am still unclear about TOC formatting.
The situation is that I have a document with 4 levels of Auto Title Headings which I might call H1, H2, H3, and H4. For the table of contents page I want to show headings H2 H3 and H4 .
Am I correct in assuming that I need to create a Paragraph and Character Style for each of the 3 heading styles I want to use in the TOC. Put another way each Heading Style would need to have its own Para/Char style e.g H2’s Para/Char style called perhaps H2TOC, Heading H3’s style to be called H3TOC and Heading H4’s style to be called H4TOC.
I believe that I then need to assign each Table of Contents entry with the correct Para/Char style from the styles I have created. However I am not clear if I need to a) assign the Para/Char style using TOC Format under Auto Titles menu or b) after the Table of contents page has been generated apply Para/Char style manually as you would any Paragraph and Character Style
Hope the questions make sense and someone can confirm or refute my understanding
Thanks in advance

David
aechallu
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Re: Re Moving to Mellel from MS Word TOC question

Post by aechallu »

Welcome.
Am I correct in assuming that I need to create a Paragraph and Character Style for each of the 3 heading styles I want to use in the TOC. Put another way each Heading Style would need to have its own Para/Char style e.g H2’s Para/Char style called perhaps H2TOC, Heading H3’s style to be called H3TOC and Heading H4’s style to be called H4TOC.
Not really, there's nothing that makes it necessary to tie a certain autotitle with a given paragraph & character style, you can freely use any combination that works for you. I keep my styles simple, so they are all regular-non-indented paragraphs. I didn't experience a problem with that, but in honesty I was a slacker and had a simplistic TOC containing only H1-level entries in my TOC, and then separate TOCs for figures and tables.

Just to narrate my experience, the problems I faced were other: 1) how to insert a page break before the Figure and the Table TOCs? I couldn't do that in the autotitle window, and had to insert the breaks manually. That meant that the pagination became irrelevant. I had to insert a couple of blank pages to account for the breaks, and then remove them once I did the TOC. (I imagine that 2.5 now updates all TOC page references automatically and this problem is now solved.) Also, mixing unnumbered items, such as the acknowledgments & introduction, with same-level numbered items (chapters) was a dirty hack. (I had to define the unnumbered top level elements as level 6 [back then I used invisible level 5's to keep bookmarks!] and format them as level 1 without the numbering. That makes the outline look bad.)

The bottomline is that it pays off to do some research in advance, specially if you're planning to have a complicated TOC.
Mart°n
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Re: Re Moving to Mellel from MS Word TOC question

Post by Mart°n »

hha1911 wrote:Hi All,
The situation is that I have a document with 4 levels of Auto Title Headings which I might call H1, H2, H3, and H4. For the table of contents page I want to show headings H2 H3 and H4 .
To do this, you could exclude the H1 headings in the “Edit title flow” sheet. Here you can select the H1 heading, in the left column and uncheck the “Include in TOC” option located in the upper right area.
hha1911 wrote: Am I correct in assuming that I need to create a Paragraph and Character Style for each of the 3 heading styles I want to use in the TOC. Put another way each Heading Style would need to have its own Para/Char style e.g H2’s Para/Char style called perhaps H2TOC, Heading H3’s style to be called H3TOC and Heading H4’s style to be called H4TOC.
To format the TOC itself, you may use either separate character styles for each heading or one character style “TOC” with different variations. Each variation could include a different font/font-face/color/size…
Only if one TOC level needs to contain different font-faces (regular, italic, bold…) using differernt character styles for each heading is necessary.
You don’t need individual paragraph styles for each TOC heading as you could use one paragraph style for the entire TOC.
hha1911 wrote: I believe that I then need to assign each Table of Contents entry with the correct Para/Char style from the styles I have created. However I am not clear if I need to a) assign the Para/Char style using TOC Format under Auto Titles menu or b) after the Table of contents page has been generated apply Para/Char style manually as you would any Paragraph and Character Style
You should assign the character styles directly in the “Edit title flows” drop down sheet (reachable via the Insert > Auto-Titles > Edit title flows… menu or via the small “pen” button available in the “Auto-Title” palette window). This saves a lot of time as you only have to assign one heading style to one heading (3 in total) versus unnumbered assignments if you try to format the already created TOC.
To assign a character style to the TOC headings, you could open the “Edit title flows…” window, select the heading (Level 2) from the left column, switch to the “TOC format” tab in the right area, select all the elements (like you would select a sentence in your text) and open the “Character-Styles” palette window. Then double click on the desired character style to assign it to the heading. That’s it. You sould be able to see a preview of the new heading level in the “Edit title flows…” window in the lower right area.

After you’ve created your TOC, you can select it entirely and apply the paragraph style you like.

Hope this helps.
hha1911
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Re: Re Moving to Mellel from MS Word TOC question

Post by hha1911 »

Dear All,
Thanks for the help, the problem has now been sorted out. Seems I was making things way too complicated.

Regards

David
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