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Re: Word question - How to create a traditional TOC?
Subject:Re: Word question - How to create a traditional TOC? From:John Bell <jbell -at- PARAGREN -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 10 Dec 1997 15:14:33 -0500
I want to thank everyone who responded to my problem with trying to format
a
table of contents in Word. Specific thanks to Jane Bergen, Marie Paretti,
Reinhard Jaehnig, Win Day, David Rapport, and Sherri Hodge.
I was trying to create a traditional TOC in Word. It turns out you can't
have one created automatically. I spent over 70 minutes on the phone with
Microsoft technical support and the rep there finally discovered a "known
issue" with all of Microsoft products being unable to distinguish between
em spaces and em dashes, thus neither are allowed in numerous dialog boxes,
options, and so on.
I was very surprised to find that Word's own Find/Replace dialog won't
accept the em space.
After all the effort the rep and I went through, I think I finally hit upon
an answer. There is no automated way of doing it in Word, but maybe I can
do it with Word and another application!
My first attempt will be to bring this file home and put it on my Macintosh
where I can run scripts.
I'll build the TOC with a "garbage" character as a separator, then have the
script find the garbage
characters and replace them with the em space. Beats me typing them in all
over the place! It shouldn't take me more than two minutes to write such a
simple script, so it isn't that much of a big deal.
As a side note I pointed out a discrepancy between the online help and how
Word actually works. If you check out the online help for the TOC's \p
option, you'll see it says you can specify up to
five characters to use as separators and they even give the example of \p
"---". Well, you can
only get one character when you build the TOC. The rep tried it exactly as
shown in the help
and agreed with me that it doesn't work as documented. He declined,
however, to open a bug
report on this. That got me a bit annoyed.
Yet another challenge to resolve...
Enjoy!
--- John Bell
jbell -at- paragren -dot- com
