Table of Contents has Changed font Color to Red Italic

[BrentGG]

I am using Writer with ODT version 7.4.7.2 on Win 11 64bit.
I have been using several generations of this file for over a year with a TOC and its been fine. It was fine yesterday. Today when I loaded it, the TOC is now red italic instead of the default styles.

I went through the Styles for Contents 1 … etc and everything there is normal. Font Color: Automatic and the Font is Liberation Serif with Style:Regular
so I don’t know where the red italic is coming from.

I did a screen shot of the TOC dialog and the red italic shows up in the preview (upper right). How to I reset to back to the default values. The reset button on the dialog had no effect.

TIA

[Hrbrgr]

Try:

First steps to take before submitting a bug

[ajlittoz]

Attach a reduced version of your document so that we can check there is no “hidden” configuration somewhere.

[BrentGG]

Unfortunately it is a company document and can’t be shared. A previous copy of the same document made 2 days earlier displays the TOC just fine. The red italic text just showed up today in the TOC for this current document.


To eliminate it being an older LO version, I installed LO v 24.8.4.2 and it did NOT fix the problem. I updated the index and it did not fix it. I suppose I could delete the index (TOC) and create it all over again or copy it from the older version.


Pressing the “Default” button in the “Table of Contents, Index or Bibliography” dialog for the Assignment Levels “Title”, “Level 1”… “Level 10” does not fix the problem. Neither will reasigning “Contents 1” to “Level 1” etc.


I just thought I’d check here first in case this has happened to other people. I can understand if the Styles for [Content 1] … Content 10] were red italic, but they’re not. Everything is default settings for TOC.


I deleted the Index (TOC) and created a new TOC. I accepted all of the defaults for the TOC , yet in the Preview when I was constructing the TOC, showed red italic text. Why? Creating the new TOC shows red italic text.


So I deleted the TOC, create a new page and copied by old TOC from my previous version of the document into that page. Sure enough, the TOC text turned red italic.


So I created a new OT document, put in a few headings and created a TOC for this document. The preview when creating the TOC was the correct black normal text. I created the TOC and it worked fine. Black normal text, no red italic text.


So somewhere in this ODT settings, it is changing the TOC to red italic text. In the Paragraph Styles pane I have “Show Previews” turned on and there are no Index entries with red italic text. There are no paragraph styles at all showing red italic.


I decide to play around with Paragraph Style: “Contents 1” and change it to a variety of font effects like Bold, Shadow, Strikethrough and all of these font effects work on the TOC Heading 1 as soon as I press the Apply button. But the Font Color stays red and the Font Style stays as italic. I can try to change the font to Green or Regular Style, but it has no effect on the TOC text. It is always some form of Red Italic.


I am at a loss as how to fix this. … But wait! What’s this???
I went to the Character Styles pane and went through those and guess what I found? I found “Index Link” character style under one of my own red italic character styles and “Index Link” inherited from this red italic parent. So I edited “Index Link” to inherit from “-None-” and the TOC font is now back to the normal black text. Whew! I didn’t drag “Index Link” anywhere yesterday because I never drag items in the Character Styles pane. I have no idea of how it got there.


So hopefully this solves the problem for anyone else who runs into this problem and doesn’t want to waste 2 hours trying to fix it like I have. I did have a LO crash a couple of days ago, so maybe this caused it? I don’t know. But at least it has been fixed.


I need a drink.

[ajlittoz]

When modifying a paragraph style does not change formatting, always suspect some override. Formatting is spread across three layers, from bottom up: paragraph style, character style, direct formatting. Shallower layer take precedence over deeper ones.

Action ranges in layers are independent are independent from each other. If you apply a character style, switching to another paragraph style at end of it, does not change the character style. This is even more pronounced with direct formatting because using keyboard shortcuts seems more “intuitive” than applying styles.

So your character style was in effect before the TOC and since it was not cancelled, it applied to the TOC…

PS: A very useful feature was introduced in “recent” releases, Spotlight. Display the style side pane. At bottom of it, there are 2 check boxes, Show Preview and Spotlight. When you tick Spotlight, colour “margin tags” are shown in the document to paint style usage. You can activate Spotlight for paragraph and characters styles.