How To Add Heading Numbers To A Table Of Contents In iWork's Pages
2008-10-24
Apple’s Pages app, part of the iWork08 package is a strange fish. Pages06 was good. I created my book in Pages, hundreds of pages long and with hundreds of photos. Then 08 came out and oddly split the functionality into two modes: word processing and page layout. One of the reasons I liked 06 was that finally someone had melded the two.
But Pages06 was not a good word processor. Fortunately no-one expected it to be because it was sort of a feature of a layout app. Now 08 has a word processor mode and imports Word docs well, and everyone expects the world of it. Or even some simple numbering and lists and table of contents functionality; like I did recently when I tackled 120 pages of dense legal docs.
A challenge was getting the table of contents (TOC) to look right. I needed to have the section numbers appear in the TOC as well as the page numbers. I wasn’t about to number everything by hand (that’s the workaround I found on-line), so I did what any self-respecting hacker type would do: I cheated.
Here is some text for cheating:
It uses tiered (legal) numbering. Getting that right is a task in itself, actually, but I did it. My final TOC looks like this:
See, it has tiered numbers just like in the document! A real boon when you want to direct someone to section 23.5.1.2.
My cheat was as follows. I created a TOC as normal with Insert > Table of Contents and checked that things were set up correctly in the Inspector:
That gave me this:
No numbers. Then I clicked on the lines in the TOC, opened the Text panel of the Inspector and added list formatting to the TOC styles: tiered for both the Heading and Sub-heading TOC styles (called TOC Heading 2 and TOC Heading 3 by default in my case). After jiggling the indents with the Inspector I got it to look the way I wanted:
It works because when the TOC is regenerated, it gets renumbered. However there is a hitch, the second and lower numbering levels of the TOC keep getting reset to 1 each time the regeneration takes place. When this happens, if I click on the second level in the TOC I get this:
And have to press TAB to get the second level numbers back.
There is still no way to get rid of the last period in the numbers though. That is a fix I would like to see.
But Pages06 was not a good word processor. Fortunately no-one expected it to be because it was sort of a feature of a layout app. Now 08 has a word processor mode and imports Word docs well, and everyone expects the world of it. Or even some simple numbering and lists and table of contents functionality; like I did recently when I tackled 120 pages of dense legal docs.
A challenge was getting the table of contents (TOC) to look right. I needed to have the section numbers appear in the TOC as well as the page numbers. I wasn’t about to number everything by hand (that’s the workaround I found on-line), so I did what any self-respecting hacker type would do: I cheated.
Here is some text for cheating:
It uses tiered (legal) numbering. Getting that right is a task in itself, actually, but I did it. My final TOC looks like this:
See, it has tiered numbers just like in the document! A real boon when you want to direct someone to section 23.5.1.2.
My cheat was as follows. I created a TOC as normal with Insert > Table of Contents and checked that things were set up correctly in the Inspector:
That gave me this:
No numbers. Then I clicked on the lines in the TOC, opened the Text panel of the Inspector and added list formatting to the TOC styles: tiered for both the Heading and Sub-heading TOC styles (called TOC Heading 2 and TOC Heading 3 by default in my case). After jiggling the indents with the Inspector I got it to look the way I wanted:
It works because when the TOC is regenerated, it gets renumbered. However there is a hitch, the second and lower numbering levels of the TOC keep getting reset to 1 each time the regeneration takes place. When this happens, if I click on the second level in the TOC I get this:
And have to press TAB to get the second level numbers back.
There is still no way to get rid of the last period in the numbers though. That is a fix I would like to see.
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