Table of contents in Layout?

Hi Christian,

I’ve recently tried to create one of these (on a PC) and discovered that MAC computers (much to my fiancee’s delight) have superior table features that PC platform’s running SU & layout currently don’t have.

I would love to get this feature up and running as I’ve just created a tender pack of docs at 60 pages and had to do a manual table with no auto-fill/linked text fields.

I had a look at the auto-text fields and tried to get the page numbers & titles into a table (or even as free text on my manual version of my table of contents).

I must admit I’m used to programs such as Adobe In-Design being fantastic at making this process very easy as well as applying things like type styles to a document as well as more advanced text formatting / alignment tools.

I imagine there are a lot more users out there who are also keen to see this feature up and running!

Hopefully someone clever than me - maybe one of the developers - can help move this along?

Regards,

Joe

Now that SketchUp 2018 has a LayOut API, I’ve developed an extension to auto-generate a table of contents/sheet list for any LayOut file. You can try it out here:
https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/sheet-list-generator-layout

I’d be glad to hear any feedback that you have!

Thanks,
Andrew

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Thanks Andrew, good on you! However I’m running SU & Layout 2016 as we are not happy with some of the rendering and other functionality in 2017 and 2018. Once these issues are resolved we’ll happily make the change to SU2018 & layout.

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It would be great if LayOut would have Table of Contents supported nativity. This is very frustrating when I need to create this list manually, and when the list is ready I need to add some extra pages to it. It should be generated automaticity.

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Hi everybody,

We are working on some functionality related to the ability to generate and maintain a table of contents or index. If you are willing to share screenshots of the tables of contents or indexes you’ve created manually in LayOut, it would help us get an idea how well our work-in-progress can support your document organization. In particular, we are eager to see how you may be using various sheet number formats in one document index. Thanks in advance (if you are willing to share!).

Mark

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@JQL

@AK_SAM

@Odd_Haakon_Byberg

@rvamerongen

@bmike

For table of content: Now I just take a screenshot of my page palette, and name my pages in the pages palette with both drawing number and drawing name. In my autocad days I made complex spreadsheets like the one attached, It has drawing categories, numbering, name, scale, revisjon, revision date, and also date for first edition of the drawing.

Print date is good, but I think revision date needs to be set manually, as it is usually a deliberate choice so set a new revision for a drawing, and state the changes. If your project ends up in court, those dates and descriptions can be important :slight_smile:

Everybody will want to format the table in their own style, so I guess the best approach I can think of is to have a regular table with lots of “auto text collectors” defined in the header row for each column, and a function to auto populate each row based on the pages palette and collect auto text from that page into each row.

It there were also callout functions to state name/scale of individual viewports on a specific page, those could be treated the same way, collected from every page into the table of contents.It could work the same way as with creating viewport clipping masks, one selects a viewport and a text box, and then that text box can display the properties of that viewport, much like what the label function presents now, collecting data from the component it references.

If one could define regular text boxes as custom labeled text, then those could for instance be collecting text for descriptions of revisions. One could right click a text box and choose ones custom label. That way the content of specified text boxes could also end up in a table of content.

A900 tegningsliste.pdf (131.0 KB)

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I just keep mine super simple…of course because they are manually entered.
The drawing pages themselves contain more info eg Version number & Last modified date. I dont add that to the index.

In LayOut the i use the Page Name field to describe the Drawing Number (which goes in the lower-right hand side). The “UD501” is the last part of the drawing number (which is longer and follows international conventions eg A104010.3.C.AR.UD501). Many would choose to enter the entire number in the index.


A common thing that Mark might like to think about is the need to create groupings of drawings.
For example I may have 40 Shadow Studies; not all of them need to be placed into an index, so I say UD401-UD533.

My first index example also contains a number of drawing sprepared by others which are inserted as PDFs into this drawing set.

The Table of Contents tool in InDesign is brilliant, by the way. Being able to choose what elements are added to the table is excellent. In LO’s case it could include all the autotext fields eg Drawing number, status, revision, date, author, reviewer, etc.
(by the way we also need a few more autotext fields, customisable ones ideally).

A table format seems like the simplest (rather than a numbered list)- it would be nice if we could edit the cell border strokes with a bit more customisation. In my example I dont like having every single cell enclosed with a stroke.

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Really good insights AK_SAM,
Again, I hope @Adam (LayOut team leader, last I heard) is paying attention to these good ideas and exchanges about how LayOut could (and should, … and soon please!) be improved.

Sorry to be late to the party. Here are some samples of recent work. Currently manually entering these and altering them as needed. Would love it if we could pull in data from the Page Name / Page Number / Etc.


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And here is what the page pallet looks like:

Theres no automatic TOC function in LayOut.

The closest I have come is to use the autotext fields to generate page and drawing numbers.

In your example you could rename each of your pages to the full reference, eg

TF-0.01 OverView 2

That reference then goes into your titleblock using the Autotext Page Number field.
You will need to create a text box that is just large enough for the TF-0.01 part of the name, so it crops out the “Overview 2” portion.

Then,to create your contents page, you can take a screenshot of your Pages menu (or multiple screenshots if needed) and paste it as a PNG or JPG on the Contents page.

It’s another silly SketchUp/LO workaround…definitely not elegant or really very professional… but it’s less tedious than than manually updating page numbers across multiple locations (manual updates are also prone to risk/error).
You can always use this copy-paste method for the Draft issues and then update it properly in the final deliverable. Some apps might be able to quickly convert your screenshot into real text that can be pasted into a LO table.

Yes, I thought that was what the thread is about.

Hi Andrew,

This extension would make life a lot easier. I just tried to install it with Pro 2021 but it doesn’t seem to work. Compatibility says 2018 or higher.

Thanks,
Markus

Mmm….
One or the other is not right.

@drewmorse if you are still out there… could you please share your extension? I am actually interested in how the heck to develop extensions for Layout but have only made them for Sketchup so far. How the heck did you do it?

Have you looked at LayOut 2022’s release notes? You can make a table of contents natively.

Yes thanks @DaveR I really am mostly interested in how to make a Layout extension. Not for publishing or sale or anything, just for my own use.

I guess it is an extension in SketchUp, but processing a Layout file… I have no Idea how drewmorse did it what that is does… but this may help you a little (Don’t really ask for more… the notes written in my old post are still apply :blush: :innocent: ):

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OK @dezmo thanks anyway.

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