Page Layout: First page only works with mc-heading-level 1?

[royj]

My content has a Part/Chapter hierarchy, like this:
Part 1: System Setup
Chapter 1: Stuff
Chapter 2: More Stuff
Part 2: Basic Procedures
Chapter 3: Even More Stuff
Chapter 4: [etc.]

Thus, I use my H1 heading for parts, and H2 for chapters.

The problem I'm having is that when I include a First page in my page layout (along with Left, Right, and Empty), it is only applied to the Part entries of my TOC, and not the Chapter entries. The only way I found to get my chapter pages to use the First page layout was to change the mc-heading-level attribute of the H2 style to 1 instead of 2.

If I do that, it screws up the auto-generated TOC and the bookmarks in my PDF, putting the Parts and Chapters at the same level.

Is this expected behavior, or am I missing something? Is there a way to get the First page layout applied to both the first page of a Part and the first page of a Chapter, even though they're at different mc-heading-level levels?

[KevinDAmery]

IIRC, you should be able to get this to work if you designate the chapters in the project TOC. In other words, right click on the topic in the project TOC and use the Properties panel to set the topic as being a new chapter. I don't think it will automatically recognize that h2 is a chapter break on its own.

[royj]

IIRC, you should be able to get this to work if you designate the chapters in the project TOC. In other words, right click on the topic in the project TOC and use the Properties panel to set the topic as being a new chapter. I don't think it will automatically recognize that h2 is a chapter break on its own.

Done that. Selected the page layout for the new chapter, set the Page Type option to Normal and Auto-end on 'left' page option to Enabled (both are the default settings). That doesn't make a difference.

However, I just discovered that if I set the Page Type to First for those chapter entries in the TOC, then the First page layout is applied to the first page of the chapters. So I have my solution.

Note here that the Part pages, which have the heading's mc-heading-level attribute set to 1, has the First page layout used correctly, even though the Page Type is set to Normal. On my Chapter pages, if I change the mc-heading-level attribute from 2 to 1, and leave the Page Type option set at Normal, then the First page layout is also used. So it seems like Flare is looking at the mc-heading-level attribute to determine whether to automatically use that First page layout.