• Global community
    • Language:
      • Deutsch
      • English
      • Español
      • Français
      • Português
  • 日本語コミュニティ
    Dedicated community for Japanese speakers
  • 한국 커뮤니티
    Dedicated community for Korean speakers
Exit
0

Add a manual entry to the TOC for a book file

Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Running into an issue when trying to add a manual entry to my TOC for my book file. I have a book file with 14 indesign files. The first two are TOC layouts and are built using styles. I need to add a couple lines in the TOC for places in the book that were not grabbed with styles. When I go to create a line and hyperlink it does not find the corresponding page number. It says that file only has 40 pages (even though it's page 240 in the book). I'm trying bookmarks next but any advice on how to work around that?

 

(Moved this topic from https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/text-anchors-in-indesign-book-file-going-to-wron...)

TOPICS
How to

Views

203

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Not sure what's going wrong there, but anyway, if I understand you correctly you want something to appear in the TOC that doesn't occur in the text. For that you can use a standard TOC entry  so that it gets bookmarked properly as part of the TOC. With a hyperlink you won't be able to do that.

 

Go to the page where the additional TOC text is. Add a text frame on the page on a non-printing layer, and apply a paragraph style that you use for the TOC. The text frame needs to be partially on the page.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

I would put a non-printing text frame with a custom style at the top/bottom of the pages you want to link to (I usually color the text something obvious like magenta). Then just that that special style to the TOC style.

 

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

(Looks as if the original post attribution might have been changed, here?)

 

One short answer is that you can manually edit a generated TOC in any way you like — it will remain static until the TOC-Update command is given. So if a purely manual fix is needed, it should work, but it won't be persistent and it can be difficult to get a working/persistent link as part of the entry for PDF or e-book use.

 

If a TOC entry is needed and there's no paragraph style/paragraph to hook it to for automated generation or update, the "extra text frame" method Dave C, mentions is the most common workaround. But the best solution is to try to re/design the page and content so that the TOC entry can just update and work as necessary.


┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Am I the only one who wants to pretend that Peter is asking us an InDesign question? 😂

 

~Barb

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 30, 2025 Jan 30, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

That gave me a brief pause, yup. (Looks like the OP's name etc. got overwritten in the transfer here; hopefully someone can restore it for continuity. But yeah, definitely a "...really?" moment!)


┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 31, 2025 Jan 31, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Hopefully the OP can be restored.

 

If it was me  I'd add a custom paragraph style to the text that needs to be grabbed.

If it's same as other style - then use the Based On (whatever style is required)

 

Then include the custom new style in the TOC generation in the location it's required. 

 

Seems like it would fix it .

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 31, 2025 Jan 31, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Right now, OP won't even know that there are answers - won't get notifications. 

 

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 31, 2025 Jan 31, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Apologies for the confusion, that was me trying to be clever. I also got the link wrong, I changed that so the link in the question ow points to the original thread. The original OP was informed.

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
Jan 31, 2025 Jan 31, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Hello all, I'm the original OP - and thank you Peter for moving my request and all of you for your responses. That was funny to read your disbelief that Peter would have a question so I know I came to the right place of experts.

Since I had already built the TOC and it was 8 pages long and needed a lot of handwork to clean up (my client didn't want all headers and subheads represented in the TOC) I was looking for a work aorund so I didn't have to output again.  There were only 8-10 lines I needed to add among the hundreds.

 

I couldn't get the hyperlinks to work with pages but I just created text anchors for all of the areas that were not respresented with my TOC style collection and then made destination hyperlinks. That worked and saved me the headache of reoutputting the TOC. 

Now I know where to come for other indesign quesitons. Thanks all!

Dana

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 31, 2025 Jan 31, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

It is not easy when a TOC needs to be different (usually more streamlined) than the book content, but the goal is always to make the process completely automatic, so that a simple update is either a finished TOC, or only a minor fix or two is needed. (I have one book with a badly breaking section title, and while I could jump through hoops to make it work, the simplest solution is just to fix that one thing each time I do an update.)

 

But having to extensively edit a TOC after update — really-really, that should be unnecessary and avoidable.

 

One simple technique to make a TOC more selective is to have multiple Paragraph Styles for the headings — a cascade of child styles so that they remain in step, with ONLY the style name changed. That way everything works normally except that, for example, the TOC update gathers up only SECTION HEAD entries and ignores SECTION HEAD NoTOC ones. Does that make sense?

 

And the way to get TOC entries for things that don't have a simple in-text element — well, one solution is to rewrite the material so that there is a heading or topic sentence or label to tag for the TOC, and in most cases that results in a more standard flow and organization of content (instead of being an author quirk). But if you need to TOC, say, a table that does not have associated text or a heading, the technique (mentioned above, I think) is to put hidden text on that page to which a TOC link can be made.

 

But that's what we're here for, now that you've found the forum. More details about your project would help.


┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
New Here ,
Jan 31, 2025 Jan 31, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

Part of the issue is that I had some sloppy paragraph styling to begin with and so I had to overcompensate for that when I was making the book TOC. It was because I kept building new sections off previous sections and the color changed for each section, so I had multiples of things. Everytime I tried to clean something up it created more work.  The deadline was insane and in the midst of lots of other projects or deadlines, so I have to live with a "could be better" TOC.  It's a good learning lesson for me on more properly defining and naming  my paragraph styles. Thanks again!

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 31, 2025 Jan 31, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

LATEST

Absolutely nothing tops having a clean, organized doc structure, especially styles and their application, in ID. It's not just fussing around with the layout, but so many things (like TOC generation) are dependent on that organized structure. You can't really patch and fix and work around a sloppy setup, at least, not without just as much work or more.


┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 31, 2025 Jan 31, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

quote

[...] That was funny to read your disbelief that Peter would have a question [...] 


By @dgbeig

 

Yeah 😉 it was extremely strange 😉 

 

Looks like you've had too many styles selected in the TOC generating dialog? 

 

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
Jan 31, 2025 Jan 31, 2025

Copy link to clipboard

Copied

If the headers/footers were listed in the TOC, it means you either added too many styles to the TOC settings OR you use the same style for the header/footer and other content instead of making unique styles for them. 

 

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

Votes

Translate

Translate

Report

Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines