Retain italics in Table of Contents?

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NisusUser
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Retain italics in Table of Contents?

Post by NisusUser »

I have a Table of Contents (TOC) that is based sometimes on text that has one word italicized in the text being included in the TOC. That italicized word is showing up in the TOC unitalicized. Is there a way to make Nisus Writer Pro honor the italics in the source text when it creates the TOC?
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phspaelti
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Re: Retain italics in Table of Contents?

Post by phspaelti »

I don't see anything. This is a clear failing on Nisus' part, and something they should look at improving. There are of course some questions as to what kinds of formatting that should be allowed to carry over to a TOC, but Italics should definitely be allowed to got through. Superscript and subscript too.

One thing to note: If you apply the formatting to the TOC entries by hand, they will apparently stay on even when you update the TOC, as long as you don't change the text of the TOC entry.
philip
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Re: Retain italics in Table of Contents?

Post by NisusUser »

Thanks for your evaluation of the situation, Phillip.

Martin, do you think italics and other basic formatting should be carried over into the TOC? Are you willing to put it on the list for inclusion in a future update? Thank you.
Vanceone
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Re: Retain italics in Table of Contents?

Post by Vanceone »

I've dealt with something similar before. I write legal documents with long headings; usually they spill over two to three lines. Depending on the level of the heading, I differentiate between headings with various combinations of bold and capitalization.

When the TOC is generated, it only brings the actual text through (that was a fun troubleshooting trip once when I had used the "Display as Uppercase" command to get the text in all caps.... but it wasn't actually all in caps, just displayed as all caps. The TOC brought through the actual, as typed text--not the "all caps").

So I've made it part of my document process to check the auto-generated tables after I've finalized the document text. I have to style them the way I want; including underlining or Italicizing specific words if need be.

One thing I really, really wish we could do was combine a paragraph style with a character style and have it applied automatically. For instance, I have a repeated pattern in my index of needing to underline a part of the index entry, but not the entire entry. I have to manually underline the part I need each time... and it all goes away if I update my index. In this particular case I suppose one of these days I should just build a macro to do it for me, but it would be nice to be able to style the index text as I create the index entry and have it remain faithful.
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martin
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Re: Retain italics in Table of Contents?

Post by martin »

Just to confirm what others have said: there is currently no way for the generated TOC to automatically preserve formatting found in the document's text. When a TOC entry is generated all formatting is removed from the source material, and the appropriate TOC paragraph style is applied instead. If any formatting is desired you'll have to manually apply it to the generated TOC. The manual formatting will be preserved if the generated TOC's page numbers are updated, but is lost if you fully rebuild the TOC.

There's room for improvement here, and I'll file a feature request, thank you. The problem will be in deciding which formatting to preserve and which to discard. The formatting you've all mentioned like italics, superscript and capitalization makes good sense, but it makes much less sense to preserve formatting like font size, coloring, etc. I think to satisfy all situations we'll have to give the user some control over this process.

Thanks for everyone's feedback!
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Re: Retain italics in Table of Contents?

Post by NisusUser »

martin wrote:There's room for improvement here, and I'll file a feature request, thank you. The problem will be in deciding which formatting to preserve and which to discard. The formatting you've all mentioned like italics, superscript and capitalization makes good sense, but it makes much less sense to preserve formatting like font size, coloring, etc. I think to satisfy all situations we'll have to give the user some control over this process.
Thank you, Martin, for your comments and giving hope that this might come to NWP! I could really use it. I agree with what you said above about the choices that will have to be made. I'm sure you'll come up with something good.
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