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• • September 24, 2020 at 9:35 am #127145
    Frank Fechner

    Member

    Hi,
    Is there a way to only include the first occurrence of each chapters heading?
    My use-case is the following:
    In PowerPoint like documents/presentation slides you normally have headlines on every page. Chapters often span multiple pages and so use the same heading on consecutive pages and only differ in the subheading. The TOC feature of indesign lists all occurrences of the heading elements which uses the given paragraph style regardless of their repeating contents on consecutive pages. We often have to prepare presentations with up to 150 pages using 10 chapters with 2 or sometimes 3 levels header structure.
    I’ve once wrote a script (10 years ago :O) that removes these double entries based on their numbering at the beginning (1., 1.2, 1.2.3, …) but that lacks many features and doesn’t account for some special cases.
    I’ve also tried using textvariables (running headers) together with a 2nd header style that is not included in the toc but that again violates a special case where a numbering scheme within the header is used in the form of “Header (2/10)” which is not possible then.
    Thanks in advance!

  • September 24, 2020 at 10:04 am #14331409
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Interesting idea. One easy way to do it would be to have 2 different paragraph styles: First-Instance-of-Heading and Other-Instances-of-Heading.
    But I would probably do it with a single “Heading” style followed by a Running Header text variable. I’m not sure what you mean by that being a problem with “Header 2/10”

  • September 25, 2020 at 2:38 am #127169
    Frank Fechner

    Member

    Hello,
    I sometimes have to deal with tables or lists spanning multiple pages so the heading level one would be something like “7.1 Status of activities (page 2 of 10)” and the subheading could be “Restructuring of sales EMEA” so is used to name the current content of the table. This wouldn’t work with running header and a text variable that clearly is the job of a script (or manual labour). As I’m strongly considering rewriting my script-solution I wonder if there is an easy way for simple document structures that only need help for those edge-cases.
    We are a small consulting company of 20 people and use ID since day one for nearly all our documents except simple letters and AI for all graphics related stuff. A solution for these TOCs have to be as easily usable for everyone like the standard TOC function of ID preferably without dealing with multiple formats for the same thing.
    I didn’t publish any of my scripts yet as most of them are used for very specific workflows together with our templates and styles (everything – variables, comments, style names – in german language only ;) but for a rewrite would probably open this up GPL’d in an git repo.
    Frank

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