Create an InDesign Table of Contents

today I'd like to show you how to build a table of contents inside of InDesign so how to documents open just here the first one here is called final and it has just that the final version of the table of contents that we're going to be building and then we'll jump into that start document in just a moment and build the same table of contents from scratch so a few things to note I'm assuming at this point that you do have a good working knowledge of what a paragraph style is apologies if you don't this is not the lesson for you jump over the lesson study up on your paragraph styles and then pop back in here and I'll show you how to build a table of contents because they do require that you have paragraph styles set up inside of your document so let's have a quick tour of this document just to get familiar with it so it's an eight page document I've got my pages panel open just here now the last page does read six it is an eight page document because the first two pages they are numbered I and III I'll show you how I set that up in just a quick second now if I to scroll through here simple cover page a table of contents and then just six pages of text so if I come back to that first page I'll just point out some paragraph styles and for you so I'm in my paragraph styles panel just here I've actually got my Styles group into two little groups just here one for the table of contents so those are the styles that I'm actually styling the table of contents with and then down here in my document these are the four styles that I'm using to format the document itself so if I click in the title just here you can see that's my heading I've then got some body text just through here so wherever you see these blocks of text that's just body so again the main heading through here was called heading and then any of the subheadings are just that they're called subheading in the paragraph Styles panel now one last style we don't need to worry about that that's just for my page numbers at the bottom of the page so the way a table of contents works is it actually creates the table of contents wherever it finds a particular paragraph style within the document and we get to nominate what the so our table of contents is going to be built on all of the entries for your heading paragraph style and the subheading paragraph style I'll just jump back into my pages panel and just remind you what I said a few moments ago I've got I and I I is my first two pages and in the last secret pages are the numbers one through six again super quick lesson here but the way I achieved that was if you see these inverted triangles on the pages if I double click on one of those you can see it's actually a start of a new section and if you need to create one of those you can actually just right mouse click on a page numbering and section options and you can actually just nominate to start a new section so I have two sections in here and the first one here I'll just double click on that triangle on page I so you can see it has page numbering that starts at page 1 but I'm using the style of III etc cancel out of there and then here on page 3 which actually reads as page 1 if I open up its options you can see I've started in a new section just there which actually starts at the number 1 and it uses the style 1 2 3 so 8 pages in total 2 sections so that's why we're getting what might seem like odd page numbering already go so that's a nice quick overview of the document let's let's dive into our start document and build this theme from scratch so here's our cover page I'm just going to scroll down to our page 2 or in this case technically its III and this is where we're going to build our table of contents so I'm diving into our paragraph styles panel here so your note I've only got the styles for the document here I don't actually have them for the table of contents just looking at our final document quickly you can see we've got our table of contents 3 paragraph styles in there so I'm actually going to build those now from scratch inside of our start document so let's actually create a new little folder here and let's call it TOC and I'm going go to actually create those styles just now but I'll actually fill them with content in just a few moments so let's let's do that just now paragraph styles I'm gonna create a new paragraph style and let's call this toc heading again I'm not going to change any settings I'll do that live so you can see what I'm doing in just a moment so any TRC heading so in that case I created that one just using the little new paragraph style button just down there well we can actually go through the flat menu at the top of the paragraph Styles panel new paragraph style so let's do that and this one's going to be called toc level one and I don't want it to be based on toc heading us I'll just set that back to no paragraph style so this is toc level one it's based on nothing so it's effectively a blank paragraph style and let's drag that into toc and it's create one more and it's call this toc level two and again I want that to be based on no paragraph style choose ok then let's drag that in so quick review we've now got our new folder for our table of contents styles and we've got three styles in there tse heading TRC level one and TSE level two you can base these on the other styles if you wish guys in this case I don't want I don't want to I just want them to be independent styles okay so we've got everything we need to get started so let's let's start building our table of contents so up in the layout menu table of contents opens up this nice big dialog box just here you may see fewer or more options depending on whether you have this button pressed just here in this case we want to see more options so I'm going to toggle that on we don't have to change everything in here guys just a few things this up here our title this is what the title for our table of contents will be let's just leave it as contents now also we can actually style these elements individually as well so next to the title I'm going to change that to TRC heading so that's the style that's going to style our heading so let's actually build the table of contents just now so we need to choose styles from this column just over here and get them into here these are the styles that they're going to be included within our table of contents so let's go and find our heading and add that and then our subheading and add that now notice the indenting here guys actually if I click on the top one here you'll notice notice that it comes in by default as a level one and then the next one is down here is coming in as level two you can manually change that if you wish if you just add them in the correct order you need them you won't need to do that so heading and subheading and you can see that the other styles in our document are also available from within here if we needed to so let's click on heading now we know that we want to style heading with our toc level one style that we've created so let's do just that so without selected if we come down to the style section just here whereas his entry entry style you can see that by default it simply styles that with the same style which is something that we don't want so in this case we want within our table of contents the heading to be styled with Tse level one subheading we want that to be styled with TSC level two so if I click back and forth between those two you can see that's changing just there so that's that's perfect guys that's a lot of the hard work already done let's just choose ok we'll get our cursor just here and I'm going to place that on the page there like so so there's a table of contents looking pretty terrible but you can see all the basic elements are just there so there's our title let me zoom in a little just here so there's no title and if I click inside of there you'll notice that it's there and it's also been starred with TRC heading if I click on Baris just here you can see yes it's there it's correctly identifying page 1 and it's also showing up as TSC level 1 and then these guys just in here which are subsections of Burroughs they're all been formatted with TSC level 2 so this is perfect this is functionally working beautifully all we need to do now is come in and edit our actual TOC styles to achieve and I'll jump over to the final document and roll up to our table of contents so this is the look we're going for and this is where we are currently at just now so let's say let's format that and we'll go through that rather quickly there guys so paragraph Styles TOC heading I'm just going to double click on that to open her up let's change that to say myriad Pro and then 24 now again you can make this whatever you like I'm just doing this to taste so you can see it's already changed our heading just out there which is great TOC level 1 let's double click on that and change a few things so again I'm going to change that to myriad Pro and let's go with say semi bold and 15 points and let's jump into our indents and spacing I notice with my preview had turned on guys you can already see it's changing out here which is great and let's have a look at the space before let's add it up to a 7 mil space before choose ok tse level 2 let's let's change that to myriad Pro as well 13 points and indents and spacing space before let's get a bit of a two mental space going on and just in there so this is already looking much better but obviously if I jump into my final document we need to now start getting these dots going on here a little bit of indenting as well so let's do that just now so we can easily dive back into TAC level 2 indents and spacing let's get some left indent going on just in here let's actually make this 12 mil choose okay so that's looking great we just have to get those dots in there now so how do we do that also if we look in our final document just here you will notice that the numbers here are all right aligned so to achieve that we need to go back in and edit our table of contents so if I go up to the layout menu notice the update table of contents is grayed out that's because the table of contents isn't actually selected if I select it go back up to the layout menu you will see that it now is updatable so if I click on that it's updated the table of contents so we'll see that later that's that's going to be very handy for us later that's not going to be what we need to do right now we actually need to go up to the layout menu and choose table of contents so how do we get those numbers right aligned what we need to do is choose heading actually remove this so we can see so where is his borrows one here is actually tab character between those two that's what this entry just down here is between entry and number that is the InDesign short code for a tab so if I go to this flat menu just here you can see tab character is just here I want to remove that so we can delete that from the flat menu we're going to replace this with the right indent tab so if I choose that and if I choose okay Cheers okay there it is fantastic the numbers are now right aligning themselves so let's get back in there and do that for the other style so layout table of contents so with subheading selected we can just select and delete that go to the flat menu and choose right indent tab cheers okay fantastic okay so all the numbers are nicely aligned so how do we get those dots between the entry just here and the actual number just here well we actually need to do that inside of the paragraph style so let's open up TOC level one and let's come down to the tab section this is a little strange I know but inside the tab section we have the ability to insert a tab into our paragraph style but what the table of contents will actually be doing is its you remember that we inserted that right indent tab so what it's going to do is it's going to look for any formatting that we do to tabs now and actually applicate that within the table of contents I die no but it does work guys it doesn't matter what kind of tab we insert so just for a laugh we'll choose a left indent tab and I'll just click in here somewhere to place a tab you'll notice that nothing's changed at here but we have this leader option just down here so with the tab selected if I press into the leader field if I press the full stop character just here and if I press the tab key to commit that there we have it add dots are showing up now these are very closely spaced and as if you like that that's perfectly fine I tend to like to get a bit of breathing space just in here so back inside of the leader field I'll often put in like the full stop followed by maybe two or three spaces press my tab key to commit that and there we have it showing up just in there like so I'll choose okay let's go into TRC level two and do the same so pop into our tabs character tab section remember guys doesn't matter what tab you choose or where you put it so let's in this case choose say a center justified tab just to prove my point here and I'll click over here so Kay nothing changes just adhere it inside the leader field I'll put in dot space space press my tab key to commit that and there you go that's it coming in there like so choose okay now the little thing which I'll point out let's zoom in a little bit just here you can see that the spacing on some of these is a little bit tight so for example where it's got the Bronx just here you can see that that full stop character is showing up very close to that bracket just there not a big problem you might even argue it's not a problem there just if you did want to get a little bit more spacing going on in here I'll show you how to do that just now so back under the layout menu table of contents remember where we put in our right indent tab character just do that which lets do this for the heading so in this case I'm going to be going after Burroughs so just after the S and before the full stop there so these are right indent tab but there's nothing for example it's to stop us from putting in say a space just in here if I do that and choose okay cheers okay you can see it's now introduced a little bit of a space after this entry before it starts putting in the dots so if I now want to do the one for the Bronx which I pointed out a moment ago layout table of contents go down to subheading which is what's controlling this one just here and maybe just pop in a space just before there choose okay now keep a close eye on here cheers okay and there we go fantastic that worked there as well guys you could also put a space after the right indent tab if you wanted to change some of the spacing just up here as well okay so I think that's working fantastically there's a few little things left for me to show you if you make a change the document it won't immediately show up here inside of your table of contents so no for example this one here is just called Burroughs so let's scroll down here so Burroughs and let's do something weird gonna pop some in brackets and we'll just put in here something weird for wonderful bit of phrase now if I scroll up here notice that does not show up just here so we need to come up to the layout menu and update the table of contents but remember I showed you earlier this will not work unless you actually have the table of contents first selected so if I select the table of contents choose layout update table of contents cheers okay and sure enough it's pulled by text in in case also you're wondering why this is all in caps but this here is not inside the table of contents it's just that within the paragraph style heading I actually have all caps turned on that's all that's going on just in there so guys if you need to update the table of contents that's how you do it another thing I'm going to show you inside of the table of contents is this thing just here create PDF bookmarks these are fantastic if you wish to create bookmarks within a PDF which can seriously improve the navigation of your document so without tick box turned on and if you export out your PDF this he's what you'll get so this is one I've exported out ahead of time this is a PDF I'm open inside of Acrobat just here if you're not seeing that immediately within Acrobat itself there's the little arrow just over here on the left if I open that up and then if I open up this guy just here the bookmarks section here's all the bookmarks which correspond to the table of contents outside here inside of InDesign and also please note if I start clicking on these yes it jumped me to Manhattan which is fantastic and if I say click on arts it jumps me to there fantastic but if I come back to Manhattan and then I click on Brooklyn and Queens nothing's changing but nothing's wrong guys these bookmarks they come in as page level bookmarks so they're not actually going after the individual pieces of text your won't jump you to that it's just jumping you to the actual page that that text is on so nothing wrong nothing is wrong that's just the way it works so there you go guys that's our table of contents inside of InDesign I hope that helps catch you later

Channel: Michael Bullo

Views: 129,706

Keywords: InDesign, Adobe, Table of Contents, Contents, TOC, Paragraph Styles

Id: m4y2tm6LH_c

Length: 18min 52sec (1132 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 08 2019