Typographic and tab control in Table of Contents?

Hi Andrew,

well, looking at your screenshots…

It could be done, but you will not be very happy how one would have to set this up.

And to make that work you have to be sure that every title comes with two lines of text and every author's name with one line only.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Hi turner111,

hm, you replaced the end-of-paragraph marker with a tab?

So the TOC has a more tabular approach by design?

Weird idea:

In that case I have a solution where you do not need to do Find/Replace and can work on with real paragraphs, also updating the TOC without further problems. This solution might look a bit strange for you at first glance, but it is simple:

Work with text frames that are threaded to each other where each of the frames holds only one single paragraph.

In effect a "table" where every "cell" is a text frame. The frames are threaded from left to right and from one row of frames to the next row of frames.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Hi everyone & thanks again for your help.

I'm finding that with the current structure I have - which happens to look a LOT like the example posted by @Barb Binder, doing a simple find/replace works great.

Basically, I just did a find / replace on ¶ with "Author Name" style, and replaced it with >> (tab).

This then changed the "Article Title" style to "Author Name" style, brought it to the same line.

The TOC-generated tab and page # after the article title remained intact.

The only remaining editing, then, is to insert the Indent to Here symbol so that article titles too long for the current line align properly.

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That said, does anyone know of a more "robust" add-on or method for formatting & using styles in TOC, index, etc. ?

Hi @turner111;

As I said in my first post, it is more time-consuming to set up a TOC as x-refs, but it's a one-click update once it is in place. If you create a traditional TOC, it will be two steps after edits: update the TOC and then run the Find/Change query. Of course, you can save the F/C query to make it quicker but you have to remember to do both. I work mostly with long docs, all of which have a table of contents and I have been known to forget the second step under the pressure of a deadline. Just something to think about. 

The important thing to remember is also in my first post—InDesign can't put two paragraphs on the same line. It should be able to by now, IMHO—Adobe FrameMaker has had the feature for 30 years—but InDesign still doesn't so you will need to make some accomodation or revise the look of the TOC.

~Barb 

Good question.

In my opinion it's less time consuming to set up a TOC Style and use Find/Change after building the TOC to merge always two paragraphs in tandem. The third item you need, the page number, will be applied by the TOC Style's function automatically. Applied a paragraph style with a nested style that is responsible for typographical changes by applying character styles.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Hi @turner111:

It could look something like this:

Set up two x-ref formats:

• one for the titles: <fullPara /> 
• one for the byline tab page number <fullPara />^t<pageNum />

Call them both in on the same paragraph. Now when the text reflows, you can just click the update button at the bottom of the x-ref panel. 

~Barb 

InDesign can't put two paragraphs on the same line—so author and story title will be two paragraphs in the TOC—unless you put them in a single paragarph on the body pages separated by a line break. Might work, might not—depends on the opening chapter layout. Otherwise, @Willi Adelberger is right—create a table of contents using x-refs and not the table of contents feature. It's a little longer to set up, but will be easy to update, just like a traditional TOC.

~Barb 

Instead of creating a TOC, use cross references.