Table of contents format error

  • Thread starter Thread starter David Drury
  • Start date Start date
D

David Drury

I have a table of contents in a document I am writing,
and one or two entries have incorrect formating, whereby
the header appears as one line and the number associated
with that header as another entry below. I can find
nothing different about these headings from the majority
that give the right result.

Can anyone shed any light on this please?

thank you

David Drury
 
I can't really think that article is likely to throw a lot of light on this
problem.

Two possibilities come to my mind, though there may be others. One is that
the headings are long or contain tabs that are causing the TOC entries to
wrap onto the next line. The other is that the headings have manual page
breaks or section breaks before or after the heading text, formatted in the
heading style.

Given that however Weird Word is, it isn't really random, I feel sure that
if you look closely enough, using different views and showing non-printing
symbols, you will find something different about those headings <g>.
 
Thanks for your reply. The offending headings are not
long, and the most peculiar thing is that the heading
comes before the number ie out of order. I have even
tried deleting all the text and re-entering it -
sometimes that works some times the problem simply pops
up elsewhere. As you say weird.

David
 
Hi Sara & Margaret,

My money is on tabs within the headings that aren't happy with
the tab stops in the TOC. Happens here all the time. It takes
some conditioning, but I've found it much safer to excise tabs
from heading paragraphs. You'd think it'd make the document
look bad, but in fact, especially if several heading levels
are numbered, the gyrations you must endure to make *all* of
them look presentable (esp. when several appear on the same
page), are beyond my tolerance.

Furthermre, if you ever convert Word files to full-feathered
Adobe PDFs, including Acrobat's navigational bookmarks, you'll
find that tabs in headings get *collapsed* in the bookmarks,
which makes for a profoundly ugly bookmark pane:

1.Introduction
1.1First Topoic
1.2Next Topic
1.3This is Attractive Huh?
1.4Yecch.

Nothing more to add except that the formatting of page breaks
or section breaks in "Heading X" style -- something I'd tried
hard to avoid for the reason Margaret suggests and despite
Word's tireless efforts to thwart me -- doesn't seem to matter
to the TOC! The breaks aren't picked up in the TOC field.
 
David,

If the file isn't huge, send it to me (unmunge my address)
and I'll take a look. If it *is* huge, send a piece of it
that still misbehaves.
 
Thanks for your reply. The offending headings are not
long, and the most peculiar thing is that the heading
comes before the number ie out of order. I have even
tried deleting all the text and re-entering it -
sometimes that works some times the problem simply pops
up elsewhere. As you say weird.
Click to expand...

You don't have manual page breaks in front of your headings do you?

Bob S
 
Back
Top