Issue 94408

When updating tables of contents (ToC), legal tables of authorities (ToA),
indexes, tables of figures or illustrations, and similar, allow the preservation
of formats and edits. This will allow editing of the body without having to
recompile and re-edit and reformat the indexes and tables. That's especially
useful when yet another minor edit is discovered to be needed, especially one
found by perusing the index or table.

Technically, the method could be as follows: Compiling would create both an
invisible index, etc. that would not be edited/formatted and a visible copy that
could be edited/formatted. Entries from the visible would be associated with
corresponding entries in the invisible. Updating would cause only the invisible
copy to be updated, the visible copy would be automatically updated only for
entries that are identical, and all other entries in the visible copy would be
auto-tagged so the user could make decisions. By right-clicking a tagged entry,
a user might toggle between an exact copy of the entry from the invisible copy
and the non-updated visible entry; might keep either choice (i.e., freeze
toggling); and might bring up a dialog with checkboxes to keep formatting and/or
added edits (an example of an added edit would be an entry for "FDR..........52"
that had been edited to "FDR (Roosevelt, Franklin Delano).....52" and/or
integrated edits (such as "FDR" to "Roosevelt, Franklin Delano") with OK in the
dialog carrying out the update. By right-clicking in the table (index, etc.) but
away from a tagged entry, a similar dialog could appear but would be applicable
to the entire table, index, etc.

With indexes that collect several entries into single paragraphs, produced by
manual editing, such as:

Flowers, 32-88; petals, 42-47; thorns (for the Old English letter see
Linguistics) 71-74

a solution is to preserve the correspondences to the invisible index, in this
case separately for flowers, petals, and thorns.

I tested updating a ToC in Writer 2.4.0 without JRE on Gnome 2.10.0 but
witnessed losses of  formatting and an added edit.

Thanks.

-- 
Nick