Vinoth,
I see two distinct questions in your messages:
1) Why do you have to press the tab key to get dotted lines in the TOC?
2) Why does the reference page show "<$paratext> <$pagenum>" instead of "<$paranum>\t<$paratext>\t\t<$pagenum>"?
The answers to the two questions are closely related, so I will answer them together. I assume you are working with unstructured documents; some details below are slightly different for structured documents. When you set up a TOC, you select the paragraphs in the original document or files in a book that contribute entries. The entries in the TOC use paragraph formats whose tags are derived from the tags of the original paragraphs by appending a suffix. In the English version of FrameMaker, the default suffix is TOC. Thus, if you specify that paragraphs tagged Title, Heading1, and Heading2 should contribute entries to the TOC, the TOC paragraphs will be tagged TitleTOC, Heading1TOC, and Heading2TOC.
When you generate a TOC, it will have a reference page that contains a paragraph with each of these formats. The contents of these paragraphs contain actual text along with "building blocks" that specify information from the paragraphs in the original document or book components that contribute to the TOC. For example, suppose you use paragraph format Title for chapter titles, and you want these paragraphs in the document or book components to contain text such as "Chapter 1. Introduction". Here, you are extracting the chapter number and title from the original document. Because <$paranum> is the building block for the original paragraph's autonumber, and <$paratext> is the building block for the original paragraph's content, on the reference page, you would want a paragraph tagged TitleTOC that contains "Chapter <$paranum>. <$paratext>".
The first time you generate a TOC, FrameMaker creates the reference frame and the paragraphs it must contain for you. It doesn't know what content you want in the TOC entries, so it uses the pretty generic content "<$paratext> <$pagenum>". The second building block here, <$pagenum> is the page number of which the contributing paragraph started. Once you've built a TOC, you can edit the reference page and save the result. The next time you generate the TOC, FrameMaker will use the edited reference page to define the entries. By the way, if you want to use the same reference page for another document or book, you can copy the first TOC to the folder where it will be stored for the second document or book, naming it the way that document or book's TOC will be named. Thus, there is no need to edit multiple reference pages for different documents.
I am finally ready to start to answer your questions:
1) Why do you have to press the tab key to get dotted lines in the TOC?
2) Why does the reference page show <$paratext> <$pagenum> instead of <$paranum>\t<$paratext>\t\t<$pagenum>?
Starting with question 2), the reference page shows "<$paratext> <$pagenum>" instead of "<$paranum>\t<$paratext>\t\t<$pagenum>" because the former is the default. If the latter is what you want, you need to change the paragraph on the reference page to contain the latter and then save the ToC.
Going back to question 1), you have to insert tab characters manually, because you haven't yet added them to the paragraphs on the reference page.
One further catch is that when you are editing the reference page, you don't type "\t" but actually press the tab key. If you use View > Text Symbols to display text symbols, a sequence of one or more tab characters will be shown as a single elongated '>' character. Since there's no such display convention in this forum, Winfried uses "\t" to indicate where you should insert an actual ta character. (The reason text symbols displays multiple adjacent tabs with one symbol is that displayed text symbols don't occupy space on a line so that line breaks stay the same whether or not text symbols are shown. The text symbol is crammed between visible characters and there's no room for more than one of these pseudo characters.)
--Lynne
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