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Inspiring
July 2, 2026
Question

How to do this in a Table of Contents?

  • July 2, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 35 views

Just experimenting a bit & wondering how to accomplish this, if possible, while minimizing manually editing each time. I haven’t done a lot of tricky TOCs, but haven’t been able to figure this one out yet. 

Example below… 

Even better would be if the story title could have its own formatting automatically as well.

The issue is that what’s shown here as “Author Name” is a style that has a hard return after it in the body. I assume nested styles may be the answer, so I’ll have to read up on that a bit.

 

Any suggestions? 

Thanks

    1 reply

    Peter Kahrel
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    July 3, 2026

    > wondering how to accomplish this

    You don’t actually say what ‘this’ is, but I’m guessing it’s about that forced line break you inserted to prevent the text overlapping the page number. You do that by setting the paragraph’s right indent and last line indent. The latter you set as a negative value.

    Author name: There’s a classic trick for this. On the page where the author appears, place a text frame (on a non-printing layer) and copy the author name and the story title in it on one line, including the tab. Apply a dummy paragraph to it that’s picked up by the TOC style.

    In the style applied in the TOC, create nested (or GREP) styles to format author, story title, and page number.

    turner111Author
    Inspiring
    July 3, 2026

    Hi Peter - thanks.

    Yep… after a bit of experimentation, it was a combination of indents & nested styles so far that is getting me pretty close.

    The non-printing thing is interesting, but I typically try to use the fewest number of elements possible :) 

    That said, I think I’ll try that out on another document to see what happens. 

    cheers