InDesign gives you more automation in the form of a generated table of contents. It looks for headers in a particular paragraph style throughout your document. The pagenumbers where these headers are found are added to your table of contents.
Time: 30 minutes
Continue from the previous exercise
Steps:
- Now that you have created your headers in a paragraph style, place your cursor in an empty text frame.
- Select Layout > Table of Contents and…
- click More Options (on the right).
- Select the header style you wish to add from the Other Styles list and…
- click Add. This moves it to the list on the left. Make sure the style is selected (highlighted blue) in the list on the left.
- Choose Entry Style: TOC Body Text. This style is automatically created with the Table of Contents.
- Now click OK. You now have a cursor loaded with your Table of Contents.
- Click in the empty textframe to place the Table of Contents.
- Choose Window > Paragraph Styles and…
- right click the TOC Body Text style and choose Edit “Style”.
- Make sure Preview is checked in the bottom left.
- Click Tabs…
- and select the Right-Justified-Tab symbol (third arrow).
- Now click the top half of the bar to place the tab symbol. You’ll see the page numbers jump top a new position in your ToC. You can finetune this with the X setting.
- For Leader enter a dot “.” This should fill the space between the entry and the pagenumber with dots.
- Click OK and you are done.
Tip: Whenever you make changes to your layout, and headers move from one page to another, select the Table of Contents and choose Layout > Update Table of Contents.
Further detailing
Try to create a nice looking Table of Contents! You can style the Table of Contents Title, the headings, subheadings, the pagenumber and the space between the entry and page number if you wish.
When you open up Layout > Table of Contents again, notice how the Style section (1) displays the settings for the selected style in the Styles in Table of Contents section (2). By adding more styles you can create a leveled Table of Contents
You can make a new style from the pulldown menu. Best practice is to create dedicated Paragraph Styles and Character Styles to design the Table of Contents. That means they are only used in the Table of Contents and nowhere else in your document. Use a “TOC” prefix to name them.
