Lesson A: Tables of Contents

You’ll note that the table of contents example given in the Compendium is a bit different than this one. Studying both should give you insight into this feature.

• Open the downloaded document called 7 Long Documents.indd. Go to pages 2 and 3 and fit that spread in the window (⌘-option-0/Ctrl-Alt-0).

Building a Dummy TOC

On that spread, you’ll see a fake table of contents with paragraph styles applied to its title and its three levels of entries. You can find those styles in a folder called Styles for TOC in the Paragraph Styles panel.

Before I build an actual table of contents (TOC), I build a dummy like this. Before I can do that, I have to be familiar with the structure of the text for which the TOC will be made. The content for which we’ll build our TOC is on the last 10 pages or so of the same document.

• Look at the structure and headings in the text on pages 10–20 of the document 7 Long Documents.indd. You should discover that there are three levels of headers and the paragraph styles they use are called h1, h2, and h3. Thus, the fake TOC is structured appropriately.

Requires a Commitment to Styles-Use

For InDesign to generate a TOC for us, it needs paragraph styles to find. The text that uses a certain style becomes an entry in our table of contents and can be styled there any way we like.

But for this to work at all, we need to use styles for the text InDesign should find and for the TOC itself.

Generating a TOC

Our table of contents will go into the frame waiting for it on page 3.

• Select the frame on page 3 with the Selection tool and confirm (with either the Properties panel or the Control panel) that it has two columns.

Our TOC entry for the article’s title will span across both of them. The other entries will be balanced across the two columns.

• Choose Layout > Table of Contents…, and a large dialog box will open. If a button on the right reads More Options, click it.

The dialog box has four sections. Almost all of our work is done in the middle two (Styles in Table of Contents and Style); however, we’ll start near the top.

• Choose a Title for the table of contents. I’m usually boring and use “Contents.”
• To the right of the Title field is the first menu for choosing a Style to decorate the TOC. For this TOC’s title, choose the paragraph style called the TOC title. Pretty subtle, eh?

The process becomes a little trickier now. We must choose the styles that InDesign trawls for to make TOC entries and we must choose styles with which to decorate those entries. In the section called Styles in Table of Contents are two boxes. The first, Include Paragraph Styles, is initially empty. The second, Other Styles, is a list of all the paragraph styles in the document, from which we choose those that go to the first box.

• In Other Styles, double-click on the style h1. This gives us the same result as highlighting it and clicking the Add button, but much faster. The style h1 is now in the Include Paragraph Styles list. We need two more.
• In Other Styles, double-click on the styles h2 and h3 in that order.

InDesign assumes, rightly this time, that there’s a hierarchy to these styles.

• Take a quick peek toward the bottom of the next section of the dialog at the item called Level. With the h3 style highlighted above, Level shows 3. Highlight h2 then h1 and note that the level changes and the name of the dialog’s second section changes subtly, too: Style: h3 when the h3 is highlighted, for example.

Now we’ll highlight each entry in the Include Paragraph Styles list and configure the Style section for it. Do this slowly; it’s too easy to forget something.

• Highlight h1 in the Include Paragraph Styles list.
• Choose heading one entry from the Entry Style menu.
• We can leave the Page Number menu alone since it correctly shows the location of the page number as After Entry. However, just to the right of that, there is Style menu from which we need to choose a character style for the page number. Choose TOC Page Number from the Page Number Style menu.
• Confirm that Level is set to 1.

The Between Entry and Number field contains ^t. That means a tab character, which is also what we want this time since the TOC’s paragraph styles include tab stop positions and leader characters defined.

• Highlight h2 in the Include Paragraph Styles list.
• Choose heading two entry from the Entry Style menu.
• Leave the Page Number set to After Entry, but choose TOC Page Number from the Page Number Style menu.
• Confirm that Level is set to 2. One more…
• Highlight h3 in the Include Paragraph Styles list.
• Choose heading three entry from the Entry Style menu.
• Leave the Page Number set to After Entry, but choose TOC Page Number from the Page Number Style menu.
• Confirm that Level is set to 3.

Note: Among the four buttons on the right is Save Style…. This creates a preset called a TOC Style so you don’t have to configure this whole dialog box from nothing for every new document. If you create tables of contents for similarly structured documents, you will want this feature. Also, InDesign’s ePub (electronic book) export uses TOC Styles to create the TOC we use on e-readers like Kindle or iPad. We have no need to make a TOC Style for this exercise.

• Click OK. Your cursor will become a loaded text cursor.
• Click somewhere in the midst of the text frame on page 3. You’ve got a table of contents!

Updating a TOC

Supposedly, we make our tables of contents when a document is complete. But there is always a last-minute change.

• Note that the first entry in our new TOC says “History of printing”—someone forgot to capitalize the “p.”
• Go to page 10 and change the article’s title to “History of Printing,” or whatever you like.
• Return to page 3 and insert the text cursor anywhere within the TOC.
• Go to the Layout menu and choose Update Table of Contents. Your edit is now exhibited in the TOC.