Suggestion for InDesign’s Table of Contents

It would be really helpful if InDesign had a simple option to prevent a Table of Contents from inheriting character-level formatting from the source headings.

For example, if a word in a chapter heading is manually set to red, the TOC can sometimes bring that red formatting along with it. The same can happen with coloured page numbers or other local formatting.

Ideally, the TOC should have an option such as “Ignore source character formatting” or “Use TOC formatting only”, so that the generated TOC follows its own Paragraph and Character Styles consistently.

This becomes especially important in long documents where the TOC is updated frequently. Manually correcting inherited colours after every update is not practical.

A dedicated setting to completely override source formatting would make TOC generation much more predictable and efficient.