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Known Participant
May 29, 2024
Question

Need help with a special TOC

  • May 29, 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 1237 views

Hi. I'm formatting a book of poems in InDesign. The content consists of 582 poems, with 2 poems per page. The poems run straight through the book, with no sections, chapters or headings, only page numbers. Each poem's title is boldface Times New Roman, size 12 (sample page attached). I'm having trouble making a TOC, especially since this is my first TOC. Can someone advise me, please? Thank you. -- Clare

 

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3 replies

Scott Falkner
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 30, 2024

You need to have a paragraph style applied to all the poem titles, and only to the poem titles. It also helps to create a paragraph style for the TOC entries. Make a faux entry with title and page number then set the style, margins, and tabs as you want them. Make that a paragraph style then use that for the TOC entries. Your TOC setup might look like this…

The results look like this…

Known Participant
May 30, 2024

Excellent. Thanks so much.

Robert at ID-Tasker
Legend
May 30, 2024

@TEMPLEAHAVATACHIM

 

As @James Gifford—NitroPress said - it would be straightforward IF you have ParaStyles applied to the poem titles.

 

If you don't - then you need to use Find&Change to apply them. 

In Find What set formatting applied to the titles, in Change To select ParaStyle that should be applied - leave text fields Find & Change blank. 

 

Known Participant
May 30, 2024

Thank you very much. It's okay. I applied a style to all the titles before I started the TOC. I then tried to do a TOC and it did appear, but it started on page 12. Plus the titles of the poems were aligned perfectly to the left, but the page numbers not all aligned. Should I just use the tab key to line them up, or is there a better method? And do you have any idea why the TOC started on page 12? That one really threw me. -- Clare

Robert at ID-Tasker
Legend
May 30, 2024

@TEMPLEAHAVATACHIM

 

What do you mean by "starts on page 12"?

You can place TOC anywhere - first entry will be where the first poem is.

If you need other entries - you need to add corresponding ParaStyles included as well. 

 

In order to have page numbers aligned - you need to define new ParaStyle and use it when generating TOC - and set TAB stop accordingly in this ParaStyle definition + align right - you can also add leading dots. 

https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/indesign/using/tabs-indents.html

 

James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
May 30, 2024

There should be no problem with this. Set up your TOC using the poem titles as the target paragraph style.

 

You could even get tricky and only put a page number on the first of each poem by assigning one Paragraph Style to the first on each page and an identical one, with different name, to the second. (You may already have that set up to provide page breaks for the first.) So the TOC would show:

 

  • First Poem About Frogs...........................241
    Second Poem About Frogs
  • First Poem About Giraffes.....................242
    Second Poem About Giraffes

 

...etc.

 

Otherwise, setting up a TOC is fairly straightforward but involves a number of steps. You might be best off finding a good tutorial, or we can walk you through the basics here.

 

 

Known Participant
May 30, 2024

Thank you very much. 

Clare