synchronize TOC and heading

[davidfass]

Hi. I'm coming from FrameMaker where the TOC item is always identical to the corresponding heading text. It seems that in Flare, if I am changing a heading, I need to independently change the corresponding TOC item. That seems weird and error-prone. Is there a way to force the TOC text to always match the heading text. Thanks.

[BedfordWriter]

If you're generating print, that should happen automatically. Otherwise, not so much.

There is a method you could use, but you might not like it. Replace every heading and matching TOC entry with a variable. Both will update from the same definition, and therefore they'll match.
I'd have thought that you could use a system or heading variable in the TOC, but from my experiments, it doesn't seem to work. You should send in a feature request.

[jackdeland]

See Scott DeLoach's slide #8 http://www.slideshare.net/scottdeloach/ ... dtricksweb. The presentation is from 2009, and I haven't tried it, but I have seen variables in TOCs before, just can't remember the syntax.

[davidfass]

Thanks, but 'ugh'. I think I'll submit a feature request.

[NorthEast]

You can do this the other way round - I'm assuming this is a help target you're talking about.

On the TOC item Advanced tab, set Auto-set title of linked file to Yes.

This will set each topic's title to the same text as the TOC item.

Then in your topic, instead of typing the text for the heading, insert the variable System.Title as the heading.

In the editor this will just show the topic filename, but when you build (not preview) it will be fine in the output.
I appreciate it's not ideal in that you can't easily see the heading in the topic itself.

[davidfass]

Thanks very much. I think that will help. Unfortunate that it is on a topic-by-topic basis, but thanks anyway for the pointer. -- Dave

[NorthEast]

Thanks very much. I think that will help. Unfortunate that it is on a topic-by-topic basis, but thanks anyway for the pointer. -- Dave

It's not a great solution by any means, so it depends if the solution outweighs the problem.

Mind, I I'd guess the other solution has problems too - for those that use it, doesn't having variables for all the TOC item labels make it very hard to make sense of your TOC?