https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=169210
--- Comment #9 from Eyal Rozenberg <[email protected]> --- Let me add an observation I made - in essence - during our design meeting. Let's forget about MS Word for a second, and even about page number updates. Now, why do people need to manually modify their Table-of-Contents, at all? There is the maximally-general argument of users just wanting to create some content, which the app does not understand/know about apriori, based on the ToC. Let's call that reason (1.). Well, this argument is rather weak; that is, it would probably not make sense to accomodate manual modification based on just that. Moreover, we could in principle offer the generation of a ToC which _cannot_ be updated, i.e. inject the generated content in the body of the document instead of into some special holding area with special handling; and this would address the desire to make arbitrary changes. But the more common reasons motivating the manual modifiability are, AFAICT, the following: 2. Addressing deficiences in the automatic layout (or formatting) of the ToC. I remember this from days of yore and MS Word: You would create a ToC, but some of the "..." between text and numbers would be placed weirdly; or their beginnings would not be aligned. Or - section titles would be broken at an inopportune point, and you would like to break them into to lines differently. 3. The desire to use different text for the in-body and in-ToC heading. For example, the in-body title might have some paranthetical text, or a long phrase taking up a full line or more than that; but for the ToC, the author can rely on the proximity of the parent heading, of child headings and of subsequent headings on the same level, to opt for something shorter. Currently, this is not achievable in LO (AFAIK) without manual ToC modification. When you engage in (2.) or (3.), and then type in some more content in your chapters and sections, or even just tweak the page margins a little for printing - page numbers change. And the user then wants to keep their modifications, on the one hand, and have tne page numbers brought up to date on the other. This is the rationale for the feature being available in MS Word. Now, if we could accommodate (1.) and (3.), i.e. structurally offer different ToC text for headings (perhaps this would require an app-specific ODF tag?), and make the formatting, layout and line breaking robust enoguh that users don't need to go manual - then, we could just consider abolishing the chimera of updateable-yet-manually-editable ToCs. And this feature would become unnecessary too. Unfortunately, that "if" is still far from being realized; and in the mean time - the feature makes sense and should be straightforward to implement. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
