How to remove items from TOC

[hferguson]

Hi, I'm working with v8 and I don't know much about editing TOCs. I want to edit so that only h1 and h2 level headings display in the TOC. How do I remove h3 and lower?

Thanks!
Heather

[jasonsmith]

Hi Heather

you will need to set the mc-heading-level parameter for h3 and lower to 0 in your master stylesheet. Open the stylesheet, click the relevant heading style, click Advanced View and scroll down to the mc-heading-level parameter and select 0 from the drop-down list. Good luck!

[Nita Beck]

Hi Heather!

Your question is a little vague and you've posted to the general forum, so it's not clear if you're talking about the simple act of removing a TOC entry in the TOC Editor or something more complicated. And it matters whether your output is a Help system or a print document, say, a PDF.

If your output is a Help system and you want to remove a TOC entry, it's easy. In the TOC Editor, either select the TOC entry and press Delete or right-click it and select Delete from the shortcut menu. (Please note that the simple act of removing a TOC entry from the TOC associated with a Help targert doesn't necessarily mean the topic still won't get built into the Help output. Read up in Flare's documentation about the Target Editor option called "Exclude content not linked directly or indirectly from the target".)

But perhaps you are creating PDF output and are wondering how to keep H3s and lower out of the Table of Contents of the generated PDF. That's a different matter entirely and has to do with how the mc-heading-level property is defined for H3, H4, etc. Open your stylesheet and work in Advanced View. Select one of the heading styles you want to keep out of the generated Table of Contents. (Oh, before I forget, if you use a single stylesheet with mediums to format different kinds of output, be sure that you've set the Medium to print.) If you are showing properties by Property Groups, look under PrintSupport to find mc-heading-level. Set it to 0, which means that it will not be included in the generated Table of Contents. Do the same for each of the other headings you want to keep out of the generated Table of Contents. (This whole process is equivalent to setting a heading style's "outline level" to "Body Text" in Microsoft Word. Can't speak to how FrameMaker does this...)

I hope I've given you enough to go on, whatever your specific objective is...

HA! Jason, I didn't see you standing there! I spent so much time crafting my reply that you beat me to the punch!

[hferguson]

Jason, that ended up doing the trick. Thanks!

Anita, I also appreciate your response
I will remember to specify my output type next time; I forget how much that matters.

Thanks everyone,
Heather

[Nita Beck]

Ugh! Who told you my given name is Anita! Them's fighting words in my family! It's taken me years to train them!

Seriously, I'm glad you got your problem solved.

[skwpt]

I'm bumping this old topic because I can't figure out how to exclude my See Also headings from my PDF Contents page.

I quickly realized I'd applied the h2 style on those headings, which should appear in the TOC.

So in the print medium, I:

• Created a new class called h2.SeeAlso
• Set mc-heading-level for h2.SeeAlso to 0
• Saved and rebuilt the PDF target

No joy. See Also headings still appears in my PDF's Contents page.

What am I missing?

Under Unclassified, I noticed an mc-toc-depth, which isn't actually set, so I don't want to mess with that. In any case, it isn't the TOC depth that's the problem.

[skwpt]

Never mind. I shut down and restarted Flare and all worked as it should.