Publishing a Master Project with Multiple Child Projects

[Laura Bush]

I have created a Master Project with 4 Child Projects. The child projects are sitting in the correct order that I would like them to publish in the Project Explorer window. Every time I publish the master project to pdf, the projects and table of contents are not in the right order.

Do you know what may be causing this issue and how to fix it, so the project publishes in the correct order?

[Tim Green]

Hi Laura,

What exactly do you mean by "the projects are in the right order" when you say that here? If you are looking at the list of projects in the Merged Projects section down at the bottom of the Project Explorer, the order there will have no effect on how the projects are included in your project. What matters is where they are inserted in the Table of Contents.

You insert child projects in the TOC in the same way you would insert a normal topic or chapter, and they appear there where you insert them in the TOC and nowhere else. You can move them to a different location in the TOC in the same way as any other topic or chapter: by dragging and dropping with the mouse, or by using the blue arrow tools in Project > Manage Topics. You need to do this with the top node in the child project, the one with the project name.

[Laura Bush]

Hi Tim!

I am referring to the order I have them in the TOC. I have them arranged in the order that I want in the Table of Contents, but when I publish to PDF, the published version is out of order.

[Tim Green]

Hi Laura,

I am referring to the order I have them in the TOC. I have them arranged in the order that I want in the Table of Contents, but when I publish to PDF, the published version is out of order.

Technically, that should be physically impossible. There is no way that you can change the order of the topics in the output, even if you want to. If you have a lot of "chapter without text" nodes in your TOC that might make the display a little different in PDF, but it still wouldn't change the order.

The only thing that might be happening is that you might have complex build options activated so that individual topics and chapters are being excluded and others are being included, giving the impression of a different order. You can check this in the editor with the filter tool in Project > Manage Topics > Explore: Filter. When you select build options with the filter tool, Help & Manual will either highlight the excluded topics with a color or hide them completely. Which it does depends on your settings for filtering in View > Program Options > General.