Table of Contents vs Running Text Variables - I need a text to appear in Footer but not in the TOC

Hi James, Thanks for the tip. I did something similar. 

I had cleaned up the paragraph styles a bit, made a new master page and changed the footer to read a new paragraph style altogether and applied it wherever I had >1 heading on a page. 

The individual headings were still H1 and were included in the TOC. The TOC remained autogenerated in the end and turned out perfect.

(I had to manually apply the new master page wherever I had two headings, that was what I chose to manually do.)

Hi Barb 🙂

That checkbox currently does not affect the TOC as H1 is a hidden object on a visible layer.

But if we were to place H1 on to a hidden layer and disable that checkbox in the TOC options, then it rightly disappears from the TOC. Meanwhile H1 also disappears from the running header field (footer) because text variables cannot read through hidden layers by default (Did not find an option to change that :/)

Option 1 - Conclusion : TOC is alright, Footer is not

Hi Barb. Thanks for your reply 🙂

I had to call in the same style for both TOC and text variable because the style refers to the main heading on any particular page. The text variables anf TOC are well in order with pages with a single heading (as seen below)

However I have a few pages where I have to include two headings on the same page (as below). So on such pages I have tried to format the separate headings as a duplicate style of H1 (say h2) which looks the same. But the actual H1 is a hidden textbox containing both the h2 words joined by an '&'. H1 textbox had to be invisible because making a new hidden layer and placing the H1 textbox on it hides it from the variable text reading it. The text variable is formatted on the Master to read the last H1 on any page.

After formatting these, I generated a TOC with H1 headings. I had to use H1 style for the TOC too as they are the actual page titles. But I end up getting a TOC that lists the hidden H1 textboxes too, I prefer it to not.

I have contacted Adobe chat support a while ago as I am quite near my deadline and ToC was the last thing let before we shipped (planned on July 1st release). And we had to arrive at the following possible solutions -

1. Setting H1 text on a new hidden layer, so that ToC does not show it when show hidden layers checkbox is deselected, but the text variable should. But I don't see such an option.

2. Setting the layer to non-print, then it is visible in the Footer, but there is no option to exclude non-print layers from ToC

3. Removing the textbox altogether so that it disappears from ToC and manually force-editing that page's footer to the way I want it. This is untidy and time-taking because I have many such pages that have >1 headings.

4. 
   If Running headers-text variable can append two separate headings on a page with an '&' and display the result in the footer. I see it currently works with either the first instance or last instance of a style on a page. No other options to choose from.
5. 
   Duplicating all H1 heads, apply a new style G1 (and hide them) for all the headings I need displayed in TOC 
6. 
   Manually editing either the Footers or ToC

Adobe support concluded by saying that - "You may edit one option which is not time taking either a Table of Content or a Variable however both the options may not be editable at the same time. You may submit a feature request on indesign.uservoice.com so that this feature might be added in the future updates of InDesign."

Manually updating the footnotes is a pain, as I have a lot of them. Manually updating ToC works but I have to wait until all the pages are perfect for export because a force update of the TOC erases my changes. Currently browsing through exchange and communities for a script that auto-updates the page numbers in the TOC while letting the text stay unaffected. I found one but it was too pricey for my budget. 

Sorry, that was long. But I thought I had to present the full picture. Thanks for taking your time to read. Any help is much appreciated 🙂

Hi Mike, thanks for replying 🙂

I have attached a couple of screenshots in my reply to Barb below. I hope I have also answered the question you asked. Please let me know if there is something else I had to be specific about.

Thanks again.