Creating Tables of Contents | Adobe InDesign CS3 Bible

Long documents such as books and catalogs lend themselves to tables of contents to give the reader a summary of the content and the locations for each section. In InDesign, a table of contents is simply a list of paragraphs that are formatted with the same style sheets. After you've created a book (or even a single document), InDesign can build a table of contents by scanning the chapters for the paragraph style sheets you specify. For example, if you create a book, you might have paragraph style sheets named Chapter Title, Section, and Subsection that you apply to chapter titles, chapter sections, and chapter subsections. Using the Table of Contents feature, InDesign can generate a table of contents that has all three levels.

Note ‚

If you want to use the Table of Contents feature, you have to use style sheets. Not only do style sheets guarantee consistent formatting, but they tell InDesign what text you want to include in your table of contents (TOC). The other thing to keep in mind for TOCs: They are linear, either listing from top to bottom the text in the order it appears in a document or in alphabetical order.

Cross-Reference ‚

Tables of contents rely on paragraph style sheets. For more on style sheets, see Chapters 17 and 18.

Planning a TOC

Before you start whipping up a TOC in InDesign, decide what the content of your TOC will be: All the text tagged with Head and Subhead paragraph style sheets? (Be sure style sheets are applied consistently to generate an accurate TOC, so if you're not sure about that, look through the documents or chapters.)

Creating other lists

Although InDesign calls its list-generation feature the Table of Contents feature, you can use it for other kinds of lists. Basically, anything that is tagged with a paragraph style can be used to create a list. For example, if your captions all have titles that use their own paragraph style, you can generate a list of figures by creating a TOC style that includes just, say, the Caption Title paragraph style. An InDesign document can have more than one "TOC," so you can have multiple lists in your document.

What InDesign cannot do is create a list based on character style sheets, so you can't create a list based on, say, names in a gossip column where the names use a character style sheet to make them bold and perhaps change font as well. Nor could you create a list based on caption titles that are part of a paragraph also containing the caption (you'd have a Caption Title character style to format the title within the complete paragraph) ‚ and if you chose the Caption paragraph style to create a figures list in such a situation, your list would include the complete text of the captions as well as the embedded title.

You'll also need to create paragraph style sheets for the TOC itself ‚ it's easy to forget that, because TOCs usually have several levels themselves (a title, as well as formatting specific to each level of listing), and each level should usually have its own paragraph style. You'll likely also need some character styles for your TOC ‚ for example, you might want the page numbers to be bold, in which case you'd need a character style that applies boldface to them.

Tip ‚

After you decide what will be in your TOC, use a little bit of dummy text to format a sample TOC before you create the style sheets to be used to format the TOC itself. Your formatting should include any indents for different levels in your list and it should include tabs and fill characters as necessary. When you're satisfied with the formatting of your sample TOC, create the TOC paragraph and character style sheets from it. Be sure to use clear names such as TOC-Level 1.

QuarkXPress User ‚

InDesign can generate TOCs only based on paragraph style sheets, not on character style sheets. This means you can't create other kinds of lists, such as a list of companies in a magazine article or research report, based on the use of character style sheets. InDesign doesn't have a flexible Lists feature as QuarkXPress does, just the Table of Contents feature that is essentially a subset of QuarkXPress's Lists feature. However, as described in the "Creating other lists" sidebar, you can use the InDesign Table of Contents feature to create some lists in addition to TOCs.

Defining a TOC

InDesign uses TOC styles to manage the formatting of TOCs. A TOC style defines the text you want in a table of contents, what order it appears in, how page numbers are added, and how the various TOC elements are formatted. To create a TOC style, you choose the Layout ‚ Table of Contents Styles, which opens the dialog box shown in Figure 9-4.

Figure 9-4: The Table of Contents Styles dialog box.

In the Table of Contents Styles dialog box, choose New to create a new TOC style. You can also edit an existing style via the Edit button, delete one via the Delete button, and import one from another InDesign document via the Load button.

Here's how to create a TOC style after clicking the New button and getting the dialog box shown in Figure 9-5:

Enter a name for the TOC style in the TOC Style field.

The default is TOC Style 1.
In the Title field, enter a heading for the TOC.

This is the actual text that will appear in your table of contents.
Use the Style pop-up menu to its right to choose the paragraph style that this title will have.

If you don't want a title, leave the Title field blank, but note that you'll still get an empty paragraph at the top of your TOC for this title. You can always delete that paragraph.
In the Styles in Table of Contents section of the dialog box, click a paragraph style from the Other Styles list at right that you want to appear in your TOC.

For example, you might click Chapter Title in a book. Click <<Add to add it to the Include Paragraph Styles list at left. (Click Remove>> to remove any paragraph styles you don't want to be used in the TOC generation.)
Now choose the formatting for the TOC entries that come from the selected paragraph style, using the Style section of the dialog box.

Here's where you apply the formatting to the text that appears in the TOC:
- Use the Entry Style pop-up menu to select the paragraph style for the current TOC level.
- Use the Page Number pop-up menu to determine how page numbers are handled: After Entry, Before Entry, and No Page Number (you might use this last option for alphabetically arranged categories in a catalog, where you want to list page numbers only for product classes and specific products). If you want the page numbers to have a character style applied, choose that style from the Style pop-up menu to the right of the Page Number pop-up menu. Use the Between Entry and Number field and pop-up menu to choose what appears between the TOC text and the page number. You can enter any characters you want, as well as have multiple characters; use the pop-up menu to select special characters such as bullets and tabs. In most cases, you would select a tab; the paragraph style selected earlier for the TOC entry would include leader information, such as having a series of periods between the text and the number. You can also apply a character style to the characters between the text and the page numbers via the Style pop-up menu at right.
- If you want the entries at this level to be sorted alphabetically, such as for a list of companies in a magazine article, check the Sort Entries in Alphabetical Order check box.
- If you want to change the level of the current TOC entry, use the Level pop-up menu. Note that you do not have to manually rearrange the order of items in the Include Paragraph Styles list by dragging them if you change the level of entries ‚ InDesign will correctly sort them when it creates the TOC, even if the levels seem out of order in the Include Paragraph Styles list.
- Choose the appropriate options from the Options section of the dialog box. Check Create PDF Bookmarks if you're exporting the document to PDF format and want the PDF file to have bookmarks (which are essentially a clickable set of TOC links). Check Run-in if you want all entries at the same level to be in one paragraph; this is not common for TOCs but is used in indexes and lists of figures. Check Replace Existing Table of Contents if you want InDesign to automatically replace an existing TOC if the TOC style is changed. Check Include Text on Hidden Layers if you want text on hidden layers to be included in the TOC. Finally, check Include Book Documents if you have a book open and want InDesign to generate a TOC based on all chapters in that book.
Continue this process for each paragraph style whose text should be in the TOC, such as Section and Subsection in a book.

Note that the order in which you add these styles determines the initial levels: The first paragraph style added is level 1, the second is level 2, and so on. But you can change the order by changing the Level setting, as described earlier.

QuarkXPress User ‚
The level of formatting you can achieve over TOC entries in InDesign is greater than in QuarkXPress.

Figure 9-5: The New Table of Contents Style dialog box.

After you've defined a TOC style, you can go to the Edit TOC Style Sheet dialog box ‚ it's identical to the New TOC style dialog box ‚ and make any changes. Just choose Layout ‚ Table of Contents Styles, select the TOC style to edit, and click Edit.

Generating a TOC

With a TOC style in place and your document properly formatted with the paragraph styles that the TOC style will look for when generating a TOC, you're ready to have InDesign create the actual TOC for you. But before you do this, make sure you've saved space in the document for the TOC. This could consist of a single text frame or a series of linked text frames , or simply an empty page or set of pages (depending on how long your TOC will be). When you're creating a table of contents for a book, it might be useful to flow the table of contents into its own chapter.

Tip ‚

You might need to generate a TOC just to see how long it really is, then make the necessary space available in your document. It's imperative that you do this before generating a final TOC, because if you have to add or delete pages based on the TOC length, the TOC will have the old page numbers, not the current ones. If you do need to update page numbering after flowing a TOC, simply rebuild the TOC by selecting the text frame holding the TOC and then choosing Layout ‚ Update Table of Contents.

To generate a TOC, choose Layout ‚ Table of Contents. You'll get a dialog box that is identical to the New Table of Contents Style dialog box shown in Figure 9-5. If desired, you can make changes to the TOC style settings (if you want to save those changes for future TOCs generated by the TOC style, be sure to click the Save Style button). Then click OK to have InDesign generate the TOC. You may also get a dialog box asking if you want to include items in overset text (text that didn't fit in your document after you placed it); answer Yes or No as appropriate. It may take a minute or two for the program to generate the TOC.

If you've selected a text frame (with or without text in it), InDesign will place the TOC text in it. If no text frame is selected, InDesign will display the familiar text-insertion icon (the paragraph pointer) that it displays when you place a text file ‚ either click a text frame to insert the TOC text in that frame or click on your document to have InDesign create a text frame in which to flow the TOC text.

Figure 9-6 shows a TOC generated by InDesign, in this case for a product catalog. Note how the section entries don't display page numbers ‚ I chose No Page Numbers for this first level of TOC entry in my TOC style. (Figure 9-5 shows some of the body text for this document, so you can see some of the text that the TOC was generated from.)

Figure 9-6: A sample TOC generated by InDesign.

Tip ‚

To replace an existing TOC with an updated version, you can skip the Table of Contents dialog box altogether. Just select the current TOC's text frame and choose Layout ‚ Update Table of Contents.