PBB Help: Consistent Outline Display

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

I'd like to make PBB documents of some of my old class notes, but have encountered difficulty getting it to display correctly. I've uploaded a sample for you to see for yourself. In the docx, the outline is very clear (I, II, A, B, etc.) but this does not display consistently in Logos after I compile it.

I welcome any solutions. Also, considering that I'm going to go through many pages of notes and format them for Logos, I'd appreciate any tips for that as well. If I missed a page covering this on the wiki, feel free to direct me there. Thank you!

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Rosie Perera

Well, first you need to start by making the Word document consistent throughout in terms of styles and numbering. The key, I've discovered, is not necessarily the Heading level of each paragraph, but it's Outline level, which is a property of the Heading styles:

Turns out you can set a paragraph's outline level without it being a Heading style paragraph, and Logos will still pay attention to it for Table of Contents processing, for example.

Not all your paragraphs were formatting using styles. Also, you had some paragraph numbering that didn't quite match up to your intent, I think.

I've fixed it up here: 8081.Sample.docx

Even so, Logos appears to be buggy in how it interprets outline levels.

LOGOS: Take notice of bug report! This is happening to me in 4.5b Beta 6.

Garret, as a workaround if you manually put in the numbering instead of using Word's built-in automatic paragraph numbering feature, and manually apply or turn off character formatting where needed (e.g., the italics for II. , you should be able to get it to work right in Logos. Might take some tweaking. Word wants to turn every paragraph you started with a number into an automatically numbered paragraph, so you just have to press Ctrl+Z (undo) immediately after it does that, and it will let you go on your merry way doing it manually.

Here's another try with it fixed up manually so that it works in Logos: 1754.Sample2.docx

Garrett Ho

Hi Rosie,

Thanks for your help. The outline is displayed well when I import it as-is, but when I try to add "heading" styles (to make it easier to navigate in L4) the numbering disappears in Logos. The sample had both in there, as you noticed.

I'll keep playing around with it. If I have the time and can find an efficient way to do it, I think the manual way looks great and circumvents the bug.

If you don't mind me asking, how do you format your files for PBB, if you've marked up anything similar?

Garrett Ho

Rosie,

Using the 8081.Sample.docx I highlighted points 1 & 2 that were displayed correctly and then clicked on the style "heading 4" and updated it to match the selection. Then I applied it to the points 1 & 2 that weren't displayed correctly, and it fixed it.

I'm not sure if that makes sense. It seems like there was a difference between the two formats and they weren't exactly the same, leading to the difference in how they were displayed in Logos.

It is too bad Logos doesn't recognize the generated numbering without getting into these details.

3681.8081.Sample.docx

Rosie Perera

If you don't mind me asking, how do you format your files for PBB, if you've marked up anything similar?

I've never done anything with numbered outlines in it similar to what you're trying to do. But I format headings in decreasing level of importance with Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. And I do change the formatting that the styles have by default. I usually like a simple black bold large text (maybe 24 points) with space before (18-24pt) and after (12-16pt) for Heading 1 (often centered but not always), smaller (18 or 20pt) but still bold and generally left justified and less spacing before and after for Heading 2. Even smaller (14 or 16pt), maybe even the same size as the body text, left justified and non-bold a wee bit of extra space before and no space after but italic for Heading 3. But it depends on what the original document I'm converting looked like. I generally try to follow the formatting look of the original as close as possible. I sometimes manually apply an "Outline level" in the paragraph formatting when I want to make something show up in the TOC but don't want it to be the same formatting as other Heading style paragraphs.

Was that the sort of info you were looking for with your question? If I were going to mark up anything similar to what you were doing, I would have done it exactly the way I did in the Sample2.docx that I posted back for you.

Garrett Ho

That is helpful, but I'm also interested in a mark-up workflow. For styles, how do you organize and apply them? Do you have different styles on a per-document basis, or use a starting template for all PBB files? Have you made keyboard shortcuts for commonly used styles?

Those are the sorts of questions I'm curious about. Thanks for all the help today!