Table of Contents when making a "Book" (.indb)

[Philip_B1992]

Hi Folks,

I have a question about the table of contents when creating a "Book" (.indb).

First a little background.

I have a bunch of 2-3 page documents (about 100 documents) that I need to be able to organize into a book easily with the File>New>Book... option. It is super easy except for one thing, I cannot get the table of contents to acknowledge any of the other documents in the book. It just stays blank. The TOC is set up just fine and works if I import the pages from one document into another large document but it doesn't work in the "Book" method. I need to have non-designer folks with just about no training do this often. These people will have to rearrange the short modular documents pretty regularly so I am hoping to stick with the "Book" method rather than having folks mess with pages (to reduce the chance of altering the designs).

Does anyone have a quick solution or know of an existing tutorial? If not I would appreciate any other help you can offer.

Thanks,

Philip

[Peter Spier · Accepted solution]

You've checked the box (after showing More Options) to Include Book Documents?

[Philip_B1992]

Peter,

Thanks for the tip. That helped. Here is what I did to get it to work.

1. I created all of the individual files including a table of contents in an .indd.

2. I created a Book (.indb) with all of the .indds in it.

3. I then went back into the .indd containing the table of contents, clicked Layout>Table of Contents and then saw that the "include book documents" box which was not previously available was now available to be selected.

4. Problem Solved!

Cheers,

Philip

[romeroleo]

It's nice that you wrote a step by step conclusion. thanks

[Jason Burnett]

I created a document with parent pages for each of my 10 sections. The title page for each section contains a textbox with the title entered and styled as "Section Title' in paragraphs styles. When it was one document with 10 sections, I could generate the TOC using the Section Title style with no problems. But then I had to break each section out into its own document. 

I created 10 Stykes called recipe 1 thought recipe 10. Then in section 1, I applied the Recipe 1 style to all of the Caption elements on each recipe image I scanned in. That way I could generate Static Captions for each recipe automatically and use the Create Table of Contents feature in each section to list the recipes for each section. Worked like a charm.

So I used the same document and saved it 10 times. (this guaranteed the same paragrapjh styles and parent pages for each section). Then I deleted all of the extra pages except for each section.

I created a new Book and added all 10 sections. I went to the first section called FrontMatter and attempted to add a Table of Contents usng the Section Title style and checked the Include Book Documents box.

It gave me only the "Contents' page which I accidentally forgot to remove the Section Tit;le style from. 

It skipped all of the other documents. Why would that be? They are all styled exactly the same (since they came from the same source document). Any ideas?

Thanks for your help.