RE: Generated chapter TOC obtusely reverts [FINAL DEFINITIVE ANSWER]

[Hedley Finger <hedley.finger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Framers:

For those who haven't been following this saga, a brief summary is at
the end of this message.  Those who have been, please read on ...

Ed Malick <elm@adobe.com> and Peter Harrison <renesans@renesans.co.uk>
came up with the correct answer.  When you generate a TOC, LOF, LOT, or
whatever, FrameMaker looks for a TEXT FRAME tagged "TOC", "LOF", "LOT",
or whatever in the reference pages of the SOURCE document.  The name of
the reference page is irrelevant -- it could be called "POOBLE".  In
fact, all the special text frames can be on the same "POOBLE" reference
page.

If the text frame is present in the source, it's host reference page is
copied to the generated destination file and the builder paras used to
construct the ToC or whatever.  If the text frame is NOT present in the
source, FM adds a reference page containing the appropriate text frame
and default builder paragraphs.

I checked the maleficent source document's text frame and found it to be
tagged "TOC " NOT "TOC" as FrameMaker expected.  Dang!  Spaces are
invisible in dialogues unless you happen to put the cursor in the text
box.  (We touch typists tend to hit the spacebar after EVERY word!)  

FrameMaker then created a new default "TOC" text frame in the reference
pages of the generated file.  It tagged the new reference page, on which
the default "TOC" text frame was placed, with the tag "TOC1" as there
was already a "TOC" reference page present.

-- 
Regards,
Hedley Finger   Technical Writer

[FrameMaker 5.5.6, Acrobat 3.02, Windows 98, HP OmniBook 2100]

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>
> To reduce my exposure to the whinings of adenoidal Word users who
> continually ask "How do I generate a TOC at the beginning of a document
> like I can in Word?", I routinely include a TOC reference page in my
> templates.  [...]  It takes me only a few moments to show
> them how to generate a basenameTOC.fm file and copy the generated
> entries into the source basename.fm file.
> 
> In the latest template I [...] added a new
> reference page called TOC with Special > Add Reference Page, then
> constructed the basetagTOC builder paragraphs myself and added the
> corresponding basetagTOC para formats to the catalogue.  But, when I
> generated the temporary basenameTOC.fm file, FM had added a new TOC1
> [reference] page to [the generated] ... file containing the generic 
> 
>     <$paratext> <$pagenum>
> 
> builder paras and used these instead of my lovingly crafted TOC ref page[...].

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