That way I can bring in the Headings I want into the TOC dialog box and then assign a Paragraph Style to each one. I know it’s a bit of extra setting up, but generally you’ll only have to do this for headings, and how many different heading styles will you have? I know it won’t work for every layout, but it’s an option at least.Īnd also, generally you want the TOC to have a different formatting than the headings, or even if you want the same heading style, I still tend to make TOC Styles like: Then if you map the style when generating the TOC then you don’t get any extra formatting in the TOC list.
If you use a Nested Style in your body text for extra formatting, rather than applying a character style directly. That’s why it’s best to create them as a last step… the fewer times you need to fff them, the better. But in my experience, TOCs almost always require fiddling, fixing, and finagleing. It’d be nice if there were a way to make a perfectly formed table of contents every time. And if you later export the text as XML or RTF or HTML or whatever, you don’t need to worry about those extra characters, too! Using formatting to adjust line breaks is better because then you won’t have to take this extra find/change step. Or use No Break or some other local formatting that doesn’t involve adding actual characters. Or adjust the left and right paragraph margins. For example, you could try using Balanced Ragged Lines to break the heading better. Instead, use paragraph or character formatting to manage the line breaks. However, even better advice: Avoid using the soft returns in the headings to begin with. Set the Search pop-up menu to Story (so it just applies to the table of contents), and click Change All. In the Find What field, type ^n (caret-n). If they’re already in your TOC, you can strip them out using Edit > Find/Change. The reason they show up is that they are real characters, albeit invisible ones (along with tabs, column brakes, spaces, and so on). If you have used soft returns (Shift-return/enter) to force a line of text to break from one line to the next, you’ll probably want to remove those in the TOC. Of course that removes all the formatting! If you need to remove some formatting but keep other formatting, I would suggest checking out the “Type > Remove Local Formatting” feature in the Blatner Tools plug-in suite. Now, to remove the character styles, click None in the Character Styles panel. One of the easiest ways to remove the formatting after you create the TOC is to select all the text in the story (the TOC) and click the Clear Overrides button at the bottom of the Paragraph Styles panel. Note that the formatting even extends out to the page number! That’s why the text in the fifth line is all messed up. That’s why in lines 3 and 4 of the example above, the formatting - color or underlining - appears.Ĭharacter styles, however, always get sucked into the TOC, whether you apply them to a letter or the whole paragraph. If you select the whole paragraph and apply the local formatting (like changing color or size), it’s ignored in the TOC.
Strip the FormattingĪny local character formatting applied to a portion of a paragraph gets included in the TOC. But you can remove the undesirable dross relatively quickly, or even set up the headings in a way that they won’t require so much clean-up later. There’s no way to make a TOC and automatically strip out the stuff you don’t want. Unfortunately, these are the facts of life. The third, fourth, and fifth lines have some underlining in it, picked up from local formatting in the document. The first chapter head has a shift-return in it, so it breaks across two lines - we only want it on one line in the TOC. And, worse, if you inserted any forced line breaks (Shift-Return/Enter) in the heading - usually in order to make it look better as it breaks across two or more lines - also come along for the ride! So here’s a perennial problem: You make a long document, like a book, then build a table of contents (Layout > Table of Contents)… and the headings show up in the TOC with extra formatting and characters! Specifically, much of the local formatting or character styles you applied to a heading in the document gets pulled into the TOC, even when you wish it didn’t.
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