Italics dropping out of TOC

[Fred Ridder]

srogers at phoenix-geophysics.com wrote:
> 
> As I understand it, William, this is not a bug; FM is working as 
> designed. Formatting overrides are not carried over to generated files, 
> so your CTRL-I has no effect in the TOC.
> > Character tags *are* carried over to generated files, so your italic tag 
> does appear in the TOC. The method FM uses to delimit hyperlinks is to 
> look for a change of tag. So your link ends when the character tag starts.
> > Perhaps someone else can offer a work-around; I don't know the answer 
> myself. Perhaps the use of an italicized variable?? Framescript??
 
What Stuart says is correct, but there's one more fact that is necessary
for a full understanding. The additional piece of information is that the 
active area ("hot spot") for a hyperlink extends from the hypertext marker 
to the end of the paragraph or a change in character-level formatting
(which can include the application of a character tag that does not 
actually change the formatting of the text). Once you understand this,
you will readily see that it is not possible to have the active area for a 
TOC entry to extend across the entire entry (text plus page number)
unless the page number has exactly the same character formatting as
the text extracted from the heading unless you specifically apply a 
workaround. My own preference is to not use character formatting in
headings so that I don't have to worry about this issue in the first place.
 
As to workarounds, one that *might* work is to copy each hypertext 
marker in turn and paste a the copy immediately adjacent to the page
number (or maybe right after the text, just before the tab that 
right-aligns the page number). I have *not* tested this myself, so I 
don't know whether FrameMaker likes duplicated hypertext markers 
or not, but I think it should work, and it's somethign that could be 
scripted. 
 
But I'd still vote for not using character formatting in headings.
 
Fred Ridder
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