Table of Contents - First Words of Paragraph Only

I agree, that cross references would do that job.

But I use often another method:

1. I wotk on a new layer.
2. Write paragraphs as they should appear in the TOC.
3. Those paragraphs have paragraph styles with a coloured character color during the work.
4. From these Paragraphs I create the TOC.
5. At the end I change the character colour to [None].
6. If I need to make changes I change temporarily the color.
7. The other time I lock their layer to avoid accidental chnges.

This is where being able to add character styles (not just paragraph styles) to a TOC would be useful...

Nothing simple. TOCs don't have a lot of flexibility; they grab the whole paragraph or nothing. This may be another case where using the Cross-Ref feature may work better; it can easily simulate the TOC feature but offers a great deal more flexibility.

It's also likely a script could process a TOC to trim it to only those bolded terms (which would need to be bolded through a defined character style, but that's basic).

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