TOC is not displaying all topics

[jafferty]

When I open my TOC file in project organizer I can see 2 different files that I have imported into my project. But when I go to "View Primary" or "Build Primary", I only see 1 line in the TOC. This line is called 'overview', but I would expect to see all of the headings, not just one.

When I only had one file (called 'Editorial') I recall seeing a table of TOCs based on each headline 1. But now that I've added this second file ("blogs"), the only item that shows up in TOC is called 'Overview', which is the first heading of the Blogs topic. And although there are other headings, this is the only one I see. However, if I do a search, then I will find my 'Editorial' content.

I hope this isn't too confusing.
Thanks,
Jackie

[LTinker68]

If the topic is found but search but isn't in the TOC, then it sounds like there's a conditional tag applied to the TOC entry. Version 6 gives you the ability to hide the conditional markers in the TOC Editor, so if that's turned off then you might not see that you have a conditional tag on that TOC entry.

BTW, that's assuming you only have one TOC in your project. If you have more than one TOC, double-check that the TOC specified in the target is the one you're using.

[jafferty]

Thanks for the information. I will check to see if that's what I did. Can you tell me how the TOC is built out? I had assumed it was from H1 as that seems to be what happened in my Editorial topic, but in my shorter Blog topic, only the first H1 called Overview was listed in the TOC (where I would expect to see all of the H1's).

Thanks,
Jackie

[LTinker68]

There are several things that control the TOC in the output:

1. When building online output, the TOC itself includes those items in the TOC Editor (excluding conditioned entries) but ALL topics are included in the output, unless conditioned out (search goes through all topics, unless a specific topic was excluded from the search function). When building print output, only those items in the TOC are included in the output. So make sure you have the appropriate topics included in the TOC and/or use two TOCs, one for online and one for print. I tend to use one TOC and just condition out the topics that don't appear in the print output (if a topic is conditioned out, it's automatically conditioned out from the TOC, although you won't see the color markers to indicate that, unless you also condition out the TOC entry).

2. The structure of the TOC and the headings in your topics may be adjusted automatically, depending on whether you have the "Use TOC depths for heading levels" option enabled in the print target (has no affect on online output). If it's enabled, then an h1 in your topic will automatically be changed to an h2 if the topic is one level down in the TOC (included inside a book instead of being at the root level). Items two levels deep will be knocked down to an h3, and so on. If that option isn't enabled, then all h1s will stay as h1s, all h2s will stay as h2s, etc.

3. If the mc-heading-level attribute for a heading is set to something other than its default value. An h1 has that attribute set to a 1, for example, an h2 is set to 2, and so on. This is analogous to the level option in Word. If you set an mc-heading-level attribute to 0, then all topics with that heading will not appear in the generated output, although the topic itself will be included. For instance, I have an h1.tocTitle class that is set to 0 for the mc-heading-level. I apply that class to the "Contents" heading in the topic containing the tocProxy. So that heading ("Content") won't appear in the generated TOC, but the topic itself (which is the generated TOC) is included in the output. So double-check that you didn't set the mc-heading-level for that heading to 0.

4. The appearance of the TOC entries in the generated output is controlled in the skin for online output and in the stylesheet for print output. You can't use the skin to hide TOC entries for online output, but you could set it to be hidden in the print output, although that would affect all TOC entries at that level. Those styles are in the p.TOC1, p.TOC2, p.TOC3, etc., styles in the stylesheet. Make sure you didn't inadvertently set the display attribute or the visibility attribute of one of those tags to "none" or "hidden", respectively.

I think that's everything that affects the TOC. Is that what you were looking for?

[jafferty]

Thanks, Lisa. This is very helpful! I am now able to get the display behavior I was looking for. I appreciate your very thorough response.

Jackie