Ventura to Acrobat

[Anthony Veeder <anthony -at- EMULTEK -dot- CO -dot- IL>]

I've produced several large manuals (400+ pages) using the
exact method you want - i.e, Ventura to Acrobat, with chapters
numbered individually - and the final result has always been
fine. So it can (and does) work.

<Theory-skip if you know it!>
When you generate a TOC in Ventura, it inserts hidden text after
the page number that gives the page's relative number in the entire
PUB that you are generating a TOC for. You can see this hidden text
if you open the .GEN file in a word processor (even Notepad will do).

Ventura hidden text is introduced with <$! . Here is an example
from one of my recent Ventura TOCs (just the page number bit):

2-6<$!~32>

This is the page number for Chapter 2, page 6. (I actually use
<196> instead of the hyphen to give an en dash, but I wanted to
simplify the example.)
<$! introduces the hidden text.
~32 is the page's relative position in the entire PUB. That is,
page 2-6 is actually the 32nd page of the publication.

If you check the Acrobat check box when printing the publication
to file, Ventura takes the HIDDEN TEXT and converts them to
Acrobat bookmarks and links. In the final PDF, the content's 2-6
will be linked to the 32nd page of the PDF.
<Phew! End of theory.>

 From reading your problem, I would hazard a guess and say that
you have generated individual TOCs for each chapter, and then
copied the text to make the final TOC.
In this case, the hidden text for each chapter's 10th page will
be <$!~10), even if it's really the 200th page of the publication!

The solution is to generate the TOC of the entire publication at
once, then your hidden text references will take into account
the entire publication, not just the individual chapter.
(Alternatively, you can open the TOC's GEN file in your word
processor and change all the references by hand...!)

One final note. When you generate your TOC for the
entire publication, make sure it includes ALL the CHPs that
it needs. If you generate a TOC, and then add another CHP, the
TOC's hidden text references will not update themselves. (Anyone
from Corel reading this?) This includes the TOC.CHP itself
of course.

This puts you in the ironic situation of generating a TOC whose
hidden text needs to take into account a TOC.CHP that doesn't
yet exist! There are 2 solutions:
1. Estimate the number of pages your final TOC will have and
   add a dummy TOC.CHP of that length to your PUB. THEN generate
   the real TOC.
2. Generate the real TOC twice, once for the PUB without a TOC and
   then once with the TOC.

--
Anthony Veeder                      eMail: anthony -at- emultek -dot- co -dot- il
Technical Documentation             Tel:   +972-4-999-0044
Emultek                             Fax:   +972-4-999-0050