Page numbers don’t work in TOC & Header (2002 latest updates)

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I’ve just done something weird and the result is that the TOC shows many headings at page 0, then one on page 2 then a bunch on page 12, etc. This is wrong. I also notice that the “Page x of y” field I inserted in the header give the same page numbers. Beginning the same time this happened, working in the document became VERY slow and the status bar says it’s repaginating every time I page down or up.

I’ve recently made changes to the headers and footers of all sections, linked some, unlinked others and messed with the heading formats that are used in the document. BTW, they aren’t the default headings but are special ones that are in the template I’m using. I’ve also tried setting up the TOC to use outline levels but the same problem happens.

To add more weirdness, I just did something that made the numbers show up in the header, but not in the TOC. (I saved that version so I can go back to at least something that partially works) If I update the TOC manually, the numbers all go to 0 and the proper numbers that WERE on the pages become 0 also.

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Hi Bryan:
I haven’t used Word 2002, but what you describe sounds like corruption. I did a search on the MS Knowledge Base & came up with these articles. Since you have different sections, check under Insert/Page numbers/Format to see if you have sections restarting & at what number. And replace your TOC from scratch. If that doesn’t help, I’d try copying to a new document each section separately, without including the section break & without including the last paragraph mark in the document.

Hope this helps.

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The first thing I would check is that revisions are not being tracked. That is the biggest cause of slow documents in my experience.
Secondly, how many sections are there in the document? Are they all necessary?

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I can tell you several things that can cause the constant-repagination problem. Whether any of them have anything to do with the problem in your document, I can’t say. (All of these were gleaned from another list; I didn’t discover them by myself.)

The first problem was caused by a table in the header, with a graphic anchored in a table cell. When the graphic was removed from the header, or the table was removed , or the anchor was moved to be *after* the table, then the document stopped repaginating constantly and the page numbers also behaved themselves.

Someone else had a similar problem, with a totally different solution. Turned out the last paragraph was formatted as Keep with Next. When they took off Keep with Next, the repagination problem was no more.

Yet another repagination problem was caused by having change tracking on, with deletions marked as hidden! When the deletions were changed to anything other than hidden, the repagination problem went away.

All of the above are definitely weirdnesses, but perhaps they’ll give you some clue to what’s causing your own problem.

I assume you’ve tried the trick of copying everything except the last paragraph mark into a new document? That didn’t help in any of the cases mentioned above, but it’s always worth a try.

Regards, Jean
Jean Hollis Weber
jean@jeanweber.com
The Technical Editors’ Eyrie http://www.jeanweber.com/

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Thanks to all. I ended up copying the entire document to a fresh one, elimitated the graphic in the footer table and removed one of the sections. It seems to work. Now I’ll try to put the graphic back

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Hi Bryan:
Glad you found the solution. I just came across a discussion that said that placing a wrapped graphic in a table in the header or footer would result in the {pages} field returning a page 0, so this is probably related.

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What’s a ‘wrapped’ graphic?

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What’s a ‘wrapped’ graphic?

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[/indent]Good question. I should have questioned that myself. I assume that it means a graphic that has one of the wrapping options selected on the properties/wrapping tab (I’m looking at 97), but I haven’t tested it.

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