corrupt navigation pane

Question

My large document blew up on me and corrupted my toc and navigation pane views. I corrected the TOC problem after several iterations but the navigation pane displays all headings, captions, and most non-normal styles. This is disturbing and ominous.

Is there a way to correct what contents show up on the Navigation Pane? I have it set to include up to heading 4 (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and Heading 4) but I get lots of stuff that is not tagged as a heading. The TOC is running correctly at the moment so it recognizes the defined heading structure but the navigation pane is lost. Is this 200 page document doomed?

Answer 1

Despite what the Navigation pane's right-click menu shows, the pane doesn't work off of heading styles only. If the corruption changed the definition of one or more non-Heading styles to have an outline level other than Body Text, then paragraphs that have that style applied to them will also appear in the Nav pane.

To check this out, display the Styles pane (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S). Select one of the paragraphs that shows up in the Nav pane in error, and locate that paragraph's style in the Style pane. Hover over its name, and its definition will be shown in the tooltip. If it shows an outline level like "Level 3" (or some other number), right-click the style's name and click Modify. In the Modify Style dialog, click the Format button at the bottom and choose Paragraph. In the next dialog, set the outline level to Body Text. You might have to do this to several styles to wipe out the problem.

Answer 2

Thanks for responding Jay but the problem is that the navigation panel is displaying outline items where the associated style tag identifies the Outline Level as Body Text.

Among other styles this happens with Captions (Figures and Table captions). The paragraph style sets the Outline Level as Body Text but it shows up in the Navigation Panel at the same indentation as a Heading 1.

So as an experiment, I changed the outline level for Captions to Level 9 to see if it would affect a change in the panel. Made no difference.

Remember, the TOC is now generating just fine along with the Figure lists and Table lists. That was how I initially determined that there was a problem. When the TOC didn't work correctly I opened the Navigation Pane and saw garbage. By resetting the TOC (several times - at this point I was sick) I finally got it to generate correctly. But the Navigation Panel remained incorrect.

I have a month and a half worth of work in this document (over 200 ppgs). With the Navigation Panel not displaying correctly I feel that the document is a time bomb. This type of problem is exactly why I don't like using MS Word. When you really need it to work smoothly it will let you down every time.

I am hoping that someone will know a way to correct the internals. At this point I do not know if I should start again or continue on.