Ghost entries in printed TOC (PDF output)

[bboursaw]

I am running in to an odd issue that I have not been able to find a solution for. Any suggestions you may have would be very much appreciated.

Some background info.

- I am using TOC depth for heading styles
- Styles for h1-h5 match their corresponding mc-heading-level property. i.e. h1 = h1, h2 = h2, etc.

Most of my printed TOC comes out fine, but some entries once I get pas the half way point show just the numbers with no actual named entry.

screenshot-1.png

If someone could point me in the right direction to determine what is going on here, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks, all.

Bob

[SteveS]

It looks as if something has been assigned a heading level. Looking at the size of the font used in the page numbers I'd be looking for something with the same heading level as 'Introduction to decorators'.

I'd look into the stylesheet if I were you. It might be best to open the stylesheet in a text editor and then check all the instances of mc-heading-level to see if a style has the heading level inadvertently set. Culprits might include a style used to force a break somewhere...

[Lydia]

Hi Bob,
were you expecting text in the empty spaces or were you expecting no entry at all?
I agree with Steve that one option is that a style has an mc-heading-level other than 0 applied, while it shouldn't.
Two other options:
- Font of the Toc entry (style p.TOC1, p.TOC2, etc) is set to black. This could apply if you expect the entry, but just don't see the text.
- a heading style H1, H2 is applied to an empty row.

HTH, Lydia.

[ChoccieMuffin]

Another possibility is that you have a rogue empty paragraph with Heading 2 (or whatever style "Intro to Decorators" has).

[bboursaw]

I wanted to pass on what the cause was here in the event anyone else runs in to this.

Long story short, there was a single sentence in the middle of a paragraph of a given topic that was set as H6. I am not sure why it was set this way, but best I can tell, somebody used H6 as a way to place emphasis on the text, like a setOff type formatting. I had no intention of the TOC heading levels going beyond H3, so when it ran across the H6 it resulted in some unexpected behavior. Once I changed the formatting for the text to be what I wanted it to be/should be, everything in the TOC was good.

[SteveS]

Thought it would be something like that...

You can set mc-heading-level for H6 to 0. That would stop it being picked up in the table of contents if it is common practice, although I don't think setting headings inside headings is best practice.

You could also create a generic class you use to create emphasis, particularly if you still want to retain italics and bold.

HTH