Delete Nested style text from TOC

Question

Hello good people,I have a project in InDesign. The agency that created the documents worked quite professional. However, I am not impressed the way that created the styles for Headings level 2 to 6. They’ve created a heading style using Nested Styles. The heading continues with the text paragraph. Once I separate the heading from the main text using EM SPACE, the InDesign recognize the text before Em SPACE as being the header. See below. 1.4 Definition of requirements is the heading while the rest of the text is body text. Here is how they defined the style.  Well, my problem is when I generate the TOC. InDesign brings in the entire paragraph.So, I have to manually clean the TOC deleting the text between EM SPACE and dots. The dots have a character style named DOTS SPACING. The TOC should look like that.I tried to do that using FIND/CHANGE tool.FIND: tilda m (Em SPACE) + \w (any word character)However, how I set to stop to DOTS SPACING character style?Is there a way to do this automatically?Thank you in advance.Sebastian

Eugene Tyson · Accepted Answer

The problem is that the TOC works from paragraph styles, not nested styles or character styles.

So although “1.4 Definition of Requirements” looks like a separate heading because of the nested style, InDesign still sees the entire line, heading + EM space + body text as one paragraph. The TOC will therefore bring in the entire paragraph.

There isn’t a TOC setting that tells InDesign to stop when the nested style ends or when it reaches the EM space.

You could clean the generated TOC afterwards with GREP. For example, if the body text always begins after an EM space and the page number is separated by a tab, something along the lines of:

~m.+?(?=\t)

could be replaced with nothing. That would remove everything from the EM space up to the TOC tab while leaving the heading and page number intact.

However, you would need to run that again whenever the TOC is regenerated. The cleaner solution would be to have the heading as its own paragraph with its own heading paragraph style, and the following text as a separate body paragraph.

sebdea · Answer

Thank you Eugene. It worked.I am not sure why they decided to set the styles that way considering that each manual has hundreds of pages with images and drawings. They do not save much space setting headings that way. Imagine how difficult was to manually clean the TOC each time they changed something inside a manual and the headings moved.Thank you very much.Best regards,Sebastian

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.