[Solved] Table of Contents Problems and bugs

[yyyc186]

Hello,

Was in the process of creating a table of contents for the new book I'm writing (attempting to use OpenOffice for real work) and running into some bugs.

Environment:

OpenOffice 2.3.0 on Ubuntu AMD 64-bit 7.10 all current patches applied by automatic update.

1) Auto-generation will not pick up Heading 1 either automatically or when added as an additional style.

2) The more critical bug is the "assumption" with page numbering and no obvious work around. OO assumes that all page numbers will be single number entities and linear. Like all good IT books, this book has stuck with the CHAP-PAGE numbering scheme. Word Perfect understood this and had an option to insert chapter number (without the word Chapter in front of it) in the TOC when generating.

Thanks

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Just confirmed my thoughts on why Heading 1 wasn't being picked up. If you have a "numbering style" turned on for the heading the TOC generation will simply skip it. That seems broken. I had Heading 1 with a numbering style followed by Subtitle so I could get nice centered headings like the following with minimal effort:

Chapter 4
Clustering

With bolding, etc.

Subtitle picks up, but Heading 1 will not. Numbering schema inserts the chapter number after the world Chapter.

I can live with this bug, but I need a fix for the page number display.

[Hagar Delest]

For the Heading 1 issue, it's not a bug, it has been designed that way to avoid problems in numbering. Numbering styles automatically exclude the paragraph style from the Outline Numbering dialog.

To do what you want, you need to use a workaround:

• Create a custom Character style, with a white font
• In the Outline Numbering dialog, for the Heading 1, set the character style of the numbering to your custom style created above, this way, the numbering is now "invisible"
• For the "Chapter #" text, you've to cross reference your heading; you can use this macro to do it : Heading Cross Referencer and insert the chapter number instead of typing it manually.

NB: The right method would be to use the hidden attribute for the character style but it doesn't work, I've reported the bug here : Issue 73108 - Hidden font effect not working for numbering labels. You can vote for it.

For issue #2, you have tried the Chapter field in the structure line of the TOC edition I guess. No idea at all for the moment.

[yyyc186]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I've tried much of what you suggested, but it will be an even bigger problem with the index.

I'm having to ruin the book by changing the page numbering to work within the confines of OO. It appears the developers of OO didn't bother researching why WordPerfect and Lotus WordPro had such staying power in the marketplace. Chapter-page numbering is a reference standard in many industries, but not doable here. Now we are forced to number pages like the "For Dummies" books, which aren't reference manuals at all.

It's a sad day.

[Hagar Delest]

What's the problem with the index?

BTW, have you seen that thread: [Tutorial] Page numbering?

Can you upload a file sample showing what you want exactly?

[yyyc186]

I tried to upload some screen shots, but they are too large to attach. If you send me an email address I can send them to you.

Indexing has the same Chapter-Page problem as TOC, only it is far worse since there is no way to edit that many entries by hand and put the chapter number in front of all of them correctly.

The last book in this series is definitely going to look like "The Odd Man Out".

[Hagar Delest]

Here are the screenshots:

Screenshot-ind.png (10.49 KiB) Viewed 4180 times

I don't know about the index. For the TOC, The only thing I can't get is the chapter number of previous level before the page number. I can only have the current chapter level, which is not very good.

You're right, that's a missing feature. You should subscribe and vote for it (up to 2 votes per issue) : Issue 53420 - Add "Chapter no. without separator" to the Insert Index/Table dialog. See also the other issue linked in that one.

I tag the thread as Issue.