Need To Insert Floating Text Frame Into Text Thread

[Chris Panny]

I have a book I'm laying out which will be output to ePUB reflowable. It spans 200 pages and is one big continuous text thread. I created a TOC using two paragraph styles for the epub reader. The author wants me to flow the toc into the document and be interactive. It would be in between page 6 and 7. When I generate this, it loads as a separate text frame which is no surprise. Is there a way to stitch the toc text frame into the flow of the big thread? If I copy | paste it, it loses the interactive and becomes static text.

[Scott Falkner · Accepted solution]

Try pasting the text into your main story then Update Table of Contents.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This rarely works right over time. ID really wants the TOC in its own managed frame. But that's not a problem for EPUB; you just anchor the frame.

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

If you anchor the TOC text frame, it will remain in that relative position. Usually, you anchor it to something like the copyright notice or dedication, whatever the last element in the front matter is.

A couple of tricky things:

• You can't anchor multi-page text flows, so you will have to keep the frame to one page.
• Which is no problem, because that frame can be any height and have any amount of overset text, all of which will be flowed into the EPUB export. Thus, height of the box is irrelevant.
• Width, however, will be reflected in the export formatting. Normally, you'll want it margin width, but you can tinker with the effects of making it narrower.
• Use two defined TOC 'styles,' one for the text TOC, the other for the dynamic one.
• And, in-text TOCs are really, really, really deprecated as unnecessary clutter in ebooks, especially when the dynamic TOC is always right at the reader's availability and can be made much deeper than most print ones. Also, reader hard coding will make the TOC really ugly with bright blue underlining no matter how much trickery you put into the formatting.

But there you go.

[Chris Panny]

Thanks James. I agree about the in-text TOCs. They're not necessary, but the client is insistent. I like your idea to build two separate ones. I will implement that. The blue underlining looks aweful too, especially if you use a dark theme which I prefer when I read.