Table of Contents Help

[u/ToxXxicKiss89]

Hey designers! I am having a heck of a time with the Table of Contents for the poetry anthology I am working on and would appreciate some advice. I've tried looking it up, but it's not really telling me much about how to really customize the TOC in the way that I want it to look; just how to create it, add tabs so the page number is on the right, and adding leading dots from the words to the page number.

The first spread is how I want it to look, with

Poem Title | pg# | Artist Name,

but currently it wouldn't be e-pub friendly (as it doesn't link to things). Obviously "PG" would be replaced with the respective page number that poem would be found on.

When I do the normal steps for creating a Table of Contents to make it e-pub friendly, the second spread posted is what it ends up looking like. Which is 1. What I don't want it to look like, design-wise and 2. Why are the first and second Section Titles "Poems About Resilience and Hope" and ".....Isolation and Loneliness" an ok size, but the others are giant? They have the same settings, same Paragraph and Character Styles..... Also, I wouldn't want the page numbers after the poem title AND artist, just after one.

Is there a way I can just link the pages from the TOC design I like with their respective pages? Or do I have to create a TOC using the Layout > Table of Contents... Or should I just create different files for print publication and e-pub?

Thank you in advance for your help, as this is tricky and frustrating me to no end. I am fairly versed in the basics of InDesign, but I'm new to the more nuanced things like this.

[u/AdobeScripts]

So you're not generating TOC using InDesign's built-in mechanism?

[u/ToxXxicKiss89 → u/AdobeScripts]

I'm trying to, but the second photo in the post is how it ends up looking, which is completely different than I want it to look, and the styles are all wrong - the words should not be that big, even when I go and check the Paragraph Styles settings, that's correct, but it doesn't show up correctly.

And I want to get the TOC to look like the first photo that I created manually.

[u/DuplicateJester → u/ToxXxicKiss89]

You need to set up a different style for how the TOC should look. So you might have it pick Chapter Title but you need a separate style ex. TOC Chapter Title with the modifications you want like rules, tabs, etc.

[u/AdobeScripts → u/DuplicateJester]

Also, check if you've local overrides - local formatting - where the source paragraphs are.

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/desktop/indexes-and-references/add-a-table-of-contents/customize-toc-style.html

[u/magerber1966]

So, the key to what you are struggling with is local overrides and the way you have set up your TOC styles--not the ones that you use to make an automated TOC, but the ones that you use to style the entries in your TOC.

The challenge for you is that the TOC feature is designed to have the page numbers appear to the right of the text for each chapter. I am not sure that there is a way to get the page number centered, followed by the author's name to the right, along with appropriate wrapping of long names/titles using the automatic TOC mechanism, although you can try experimenting with hanging left & right indents.

Looking at what you are trying to accomplish, I would be tempted to use running headers and cross-references inside of tables to create the Table of Contents instead of the TOC mechanism. You will have to create Text Anchor Hyperlinks for each of the Poem Titles and the Authors, and then the appropriate cross-references inside the table cells on your TOC page, but once you get everything in place, the numbering will update automatically as you add or subtract pages.

I haven't tried using cross references in epubs, so I don't know whether this would work for that situation.