I tried to post this before, but it didn’t work. I hope it works better this time.
I finished a book. I compiled the book, first as an ePub. I got a table of contents. It looked fine.
But, when I read it on several different readers, I saw two TOCs. One was correct. The other had extra entries, duplicates of some of the other entries.(see sample below)
These duplicates linked properly to their chapters, but I don’t want them. Problem: I don’t know where they came from, and have no idea how to get rid of them.
Any suggestions?
Sample of entries from TOC:
Contents
It’s Not a Game
Indian Fork Motor Speedway
Indian Fork Motor Speedway
The Conservator
Billions?
The Residue Class Organizes
Meeting Andy
Wooed by Corporations
Wooed by Corporations
Wooed by Corporations
Three to Geneva
Concocting Our Story
The Raclette
The Swimming Lesson
The Swimming Lesson
The Screw Up
The automatic ToC generation creates links for all documents that start a new section. New sections are determined based on page breaks - Scrivener looks for page breaks and splits up the file accordingly. Usually, these are added by selection “Section break” in the Separators pane. However, if your text already had some page breaks in it - for instance, because you imported it from another word processor originally - these may be causing a file to be split up and thus have more than one entry in the ToC. To check this, select the affected documents in the binder and enter page layout view (click on “Wrap” in the toolbar or go to View > Page View > Show Page View. Then look to see if the text breaks across pages in some place you didn’t expect it to, and if so, delete the page break (using backspace).
As far as I understand it, I think Keith means that your manuscript has unwanted ‘page breaks’ in it, which the compile process is interpreting as section breaks – not that there is anything called a ‘section break’ in the text.
There’s another way you can search your entire text for an incorrect page break and delete them – but first you have to create one on purpose…
Turn on ‘Format > Options > Show Invisibles’
In a Scrivener document, insert a page break at a suitable moment (you’re going to take it out afterwards). Edit > Insert > Page Break.
You’ll see that a blue pipe character ‘|’ has been inserted. Highlight it and copy it to the clipboard (cmd-C).
In the binder click on the highest level folder (e.g. Manuscript or Draft – or something else entirely – depending on your template). Make sure Scrivenings mode is chosen (i.e. toggle cmd-1 until you can see your entire document in the Editor.)
Go to the top of the virtual document, then click cmd-F to bring up the find dialogue. Cmd-V to paste the page break | into Find, then press Next and if there are any extraneous page breaks in your document, you’ll be taken to it. Delete it, then press cmd-G to be taken to the next one (or Replace All if you want.)
NB: I’m not suggesting that this will cure your problem with the TOC, just that this method will tell you whether you’ve got any stealth page breaks interfering…
Apologies if I’ve misunderstood, but I hope it helps…
NB: I’m not suggesting that this will cure your problem with the TOC, just that this method will tell you whether you’ve got any stealth page breaks interfering…
Apologies if I’ve misunderstood, but I hope it helps…<
The method works fine, but there are no page breaks in the ms. except the one I put there according to your instructions.
So, no page breaks, but I still have the ToC problem.
If the general ‘what about… solutions’ don’t work, then I suspect it’s going to be quite difficult to work out what’s going on. Perhaps it would be worth contacting support by email to let them have a look at the project directly?
Thanks for sending it. Okay, I’ve looked at it and those extra entries in the ToC aren’t duplicates at all, but are accurate - you have somehow entered some of your titles twice. E.g. You have a document with the title “Indian Fork Motor Speedway[return]Indian Fork Motor Speedway”. You can’t see this easily in the binder, but you can in the outliner. Select the Draft folder and switch to the outliner view and you will see the problem immediately. Once you’ve done that, all you need to do is edit the titles of the affected documents to get rid of the double titles.
It’s not a separate outline - the outline view just gives you more information of the same outline, and it will wrap across multiple lines, whereas the binder can only show one line of each title. So, if you have accidentally added two lines into a title, you won’t necessarily be able to see that in the binder, but the outliner view will show you everything.
Not necessary, Jerry (not all at once, magnificent as it is). Try the Interactive Tutorial under the Help menu and all (well, most things) will be plain.
I tried using both the interactive tutorial and the tutorials from this forum. The tutorials from this forum have sound, but a blank black screen. Not very useful.
The interactive tutorial doesn’t seem to have the information I’m seeking on how to make a Table of Contents in a .doc compilation. I can get a linked ToC in an ePub version, and a ToC without links in the doc version, but I can’t seem to get a linked ToC in the .doc version (nor in the mobi version). I need these to post on Smashwords or Kindle.
Any idea where I can find a clear explanation (clearer than the manual, that is)?
Do .doc files normally have a linked ToC? I haven’t used recent versions of MS Word, but I thought that normally there were no links in the ToC – if you wanted them you had to put in bookmarks or cross-references manually – not something you’d normally bother with, given that mostly you would be printing a Word document. But perhaps recent versions are different.
The video tutorials definitely don’t have a black screen - there must be something wrong with the video player you are using. They should work fine in all versions of QuickTime - if not, then you may need to reinstall QuickTime.
There’s no way to get a linked ToC in .doc files. You can create a ToC with page numbers, but not linked. A linked ToC for .mobi should work exactly the same as for .epub, though, seeing as they are similar formats and use the same code. If you’re having problems, please give more details.
Most users find the manual very clear. It’s long because it’s comprehensive, but you don’t need to read it all, obviously! Just open it in Preview and search for the term you need to read up on. It gives some very solid information about table of contents. It doesn’t cover creating a linked ToC in .doc files because that feature doesn’t exist (is that even possible in Word? Perhaps…), and obviously the manual can’t link all the features that Scrivener doesn’t have…
I’d never used TOCs before, so I used this thread as an opportunity to have a play…
As you say, you can’t get linked TOC files in .doc files, but it might be worth saying that you can if you use the .rtf exporter rather than .doc.
Yes, the Word end is a bit clunky because you’ve got to run Print Preview (as Ioa says in the manual) before the page numbers will appear – and in my test it seemed to need me to do it a couple of times before the page numbers appeared in the actual document. But once you’ve got them, the links are active (left and right click combined on the page number takes you to the relevant section).
What will Ioa think after all his hard work 