including only a part of a Caption Text in TOC

[Airlens]

I am building a table of content. One of the paragraph styles in the TOC is Caption. I want to include only a portion of each caption in the TOC and not the whole caption.  How do I do that? I could do this in FM. I am new to ID.

[Mike Witherell]

You cannot do this in InDesign. That is indeed a clever feature in FM.

[Airlens]

Thanks Mike.  This isn't what I wanted to hear, but it is what it is.

[Laubender · Accepted solution]

Hi Airlens,

unfortunately InDesign cannot do this as Mike already said.

What you can do:

You can hide parts of a TOC entry using a GREP Style through the applied paragraph style.

That helps visually, but in case you plan to auto-generate bookmarks with an exported PDF the full entry will make it to the bookmarks of the PDF.

Recently I showed this here at the forum:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/right-align-numbers-left-align-text-in-table-of-contents/m-p...

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[Airlens]

Thanks.  It will take me some time to work through your reference.  This seems like a serious limitation on the content and length of a caption not present in FM.

[Laubender]

Hi Airlens,

I'm currently in exactly the same situation like you are.

I really like to use that TOC for auto-generating bookmarks, and I like to use only parts of the original headlines from the InDesign document.

I now came up with the following idea that is using text variables that pull contents of character styles to an intermediate result, a paragraph that consists of text variables only. From that paragraph, that is the condensed contents of the original headline, the TOC entry will be generated.

What I do not know yet:

Will this construction work in all situations I'm confronted with in my project?

How many text variables do I need? Will it get too complicated in the end?

Some details in my screenshot below:

Top text frame: The original headline where only the green and the blue contents should land in the TOC.

Center text frame: The intermediate contents. The result of two text variables.

Bottom text frame is the TOC text frame that one can update if the contents of the two other text frames changes.

The TOC style pulls its contents from paragraph style "TextVariableGenerated".

Download my InDesign CC 2019 document from my Dropbox account:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/15u2jvuzexwu2z9/201005-1-TextVarBased-TOC.indd?dl=1

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[Laubender]

Where this idea above will not or hardly work:

[1] If only one character style of the two is applied to a headline.

The second text variable will reflect the contents from one of the pages before.

[2] If two or even more headlines with reduced contents are on the same page.

I would need even more text variables that would pull contents from applied character styles.

The issues I outlined in [1] would multiply.

So I have to ask myself:

Is it worth the effort setting this up for a large project vs editing the bookmarks in Acrobat Pro or editing the TOC in my document?

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )