Making a "live" TOC with cross refs

[bluesdance]

One of my main gripes with Mellel is that you have to constantly go back and update the TOC by hand in order to keep everything accurate. Several times I've made printouts only to realize that I need to go back and do it again with correct page numbers in the TOC.

Now that cross refs are in the program, it seems like one could make a TOC with automatically updating page numbers just by making a column of properly formatted cross refs. Now, this isn't perfect since you would have to add each one manually, but at least you wouldn't have to worry about a printout having incorrect page numbers. The other advantage of a handmade xref TOC is that you could have more of a hand in the process i.e. deciding where you want the page to break, adding certain text in the middle, finetuning the formatting.

Any thoughts?

[verma]

I'm sorry but I don't follow. Never ever do I make a TOC by hand in Mellel, neither in 2.5 nor before. Are you sure you use the "Insert > ToC" command (after using the appropriate autotitle setup for auto-titles) - and check the "include in TOC" for said autotitles?

Agreed, once you made a TOC, and then change things, you'll have to redo the TOC - but that's the only problem, really. And you can do that automatically, and assign specific styles to it. The ToC in Mellel is for a 300pp-manuscript literally a work of milliseconds.

[bluesdance]

I'm sorry, yeah, I know the insert TOC command. I was just griping that unlike Word or Pages, Mellel doesn't update the page numbers on its own, you have to select, delete, and go back to Insert TOC, and that screws me up a lot because I don't remember to do that before printing. maybe I'm the only one who has that problem.

[rpcameron]

I haven't used the TOC feature of Word in a long time, but the last time I remember using it (Word 2000, on Windows 2000 Pro) if you changed the pagination of your document after inserting a TOC, you had to use the "Refresh" (or something similar, it's been quite a while) command to update the TOC with the correct numbers.

Also, while you're editing your document, how important is it to know the exact page that something occurs on in your TOC? If you're using Mellel and a TOC, chances are you're using Auto-Titles, so just show the Outline pane and navigate using that. Or is there something more that I'm missing?

[Ah, I re-read your post, and saw that you often didn't refresh before printing/exporting. That could be a problem, but as I stated before, I don't believe that previous versions of Word auto-updated before printing on its own.)

[Reiner]

I think the live-updating toc could be a by-product of making a toc with links (like cross-refs) which are exportet as links to pdfs, too. And the latter one would be the crucial thing from my point of view.

[nicka]

I am hoping for both improvements in 2.5.5. It seems logical that if the Redlers have code that does auto-updating links and code that produces links in pdf output, they will apply that to the table of contents feature fairly soon. For the same reason, I expect indexing is not far off.

[verma]

I think the live-updating toc could be a by-product of making a toc with links (like cross-refs) which are exportet as links to pdfs, too. And the latter one would be the crucial thing from my point of view.

The latter one would be very good indeed.

[verma]

I am hoping for both improvements in 2.5.5. It seems logical that if the Redlers have code that does auto-updating links and code that produces links in pdf output, they will apply that to the table of contents feature fairly soon. For the same reason, I expect indexing is not far off.

I agree - from bookmarking to simple indexing (I mean: user-defined keywords that automatically get listed with their page nrs.) we're probably already on the way.