Is Table of Contents generation totally broken?

[garydale]

I'm running Debian/Forky on an AMD64 system. Scribus version is 1.6.6.

I'm trying to generate a table of contents. However the Document Setup | Table of Contents doesn't allow me to select an Item Attribute Name nor type one in.

On the other side, I can create an Item Attribute Name, make it a string type and enter a string value for it on a page element (e.g. a page title text box). But without being able to set the Item Attribute Name for the Table of Contents, I can't generate one.

The Attribute Name doesn't seem to create or be added to a list of Attribute Names either. I need to type it in each time I add an Attribute to something.

I've tried this on new blank document as well and the same thing happens.

The Scribus documentation I've read doesn't seem to have any other steps and the last time I tried this it worked.

Does anyone have a way to get the Table of Contents generation working? Manually creating one is a pain.

[a.l.e]

Good morning

Some time ago, the development version of Scribus got a style based TOC.

In my eyes a way better solution than the attributes based one.

You should be able to

• Download an Appimage of Scribus 1.7
• Open your document with 1.7 and generate the TOC based on your styles
• Copy paste the generated TOC into the 1.6 Scribus.

I've not tested it, but it might work andbe the simplest solution to your issue (the thing that might not work is the copy pasting from one version to a differentone: if it fails, you can save the TOC into a temporary 1.6 document).

This having been said, the "old" attributes based TOC should technically work...
If the workaround with 1.7 does not work for you I (or someone else) can check if there is a bug somewhere..

[garydale]

Thanks for the reply. I note that 1.7 isn't even in the Sid repository, which means that there are no current plans to include it in the next stable release.

I can't find much information on the style-based TOC but it doesn't sound like it would actually work for me. I gather the intent is for a ToC to be generated based on text styles, such as heading levels, which would work for documents that are set up that way - like a textbook perhaps.

My document doesn't have a particular style that defines sections. Indeed the listing of the ToC is somewhat arbitrary but generally makes some sense based on content. Most of the sections have their own styles with just character styles and colours being common to the entire document.

I also usually have an index of advertisers, with the ads usually being graphics of various sizes, so again it would be difficult to do this based on styles.

The attribute system however seems well suited for both uses. I hope the intent is not to ditch it. It has its limitations but is better than manually building a ToC or index.

I don't know when the generator broke but it is not working now. I did file a bug report for it.