Adobe FrameMaker: Including Chapter Numbers in a Table of Contents

by Barb Binder

I received the following question from one of my Adobe FrameMaker students:

I am making a table of contents (TOC) for my book. When I create the TOC, everything looks fine except I lose the Chapter numbers. For example, the TOC displays "How to cook an egg" instead of "Chapter 1 How to cook an egg." How do I get the same numbers that I use in my individual chapter titles to appear in the TOC?

In FrameMaker, the generated files (i.e., TOC or index) store their structure information on the Reference pages. If you want to use the chapter numbers from the book files, all you need to do is make one quick edit to the TOC reference page within the book's TOC file:

1. Open the table of contents file. In the image below, the three chapter titles are missing their chapter numbers.
   
2. Choose View > Reference pages.
3. Navigate to the TOC reference page.
4. Locate the paragraph that controls the chapter titles. In my book files, I named my titles ChapterTitle. The tag I was looking for was ChapterTitleTOC.
   
   
   
   Note: You can click each building block until you find the tag you need to edit. The tag name will appear in the lower left corner of the status bar.


5. Click in front of the building block and type Chapter <$Chapnum>: followed by a space.
   
   


6. Choose View > Body pages.
7. Save and then Update the book.

FrameMaker reads the new instructions on the reference page, and adds the word Chapter, the chapter number and the punctuation/spacing in front of the original chapter titles.

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