Creating an Advertiser Index (or other difficult TOC)
One of the things I like most about InDesign’s table of contents feature is that it’s document-wide rather than simply story-wide. That means that any text in any text frame can be included in a table of contents — even text in a nonprinting text frame. With this in mind, you can add “tags” to items on your page that don’t appear in print, but do appear in your table of contents.
One of the best examples of this is an advertiser index. You can place a text frame with an advertiser’s name on top of that company’s ad in your document. Set the text frame’s color to None, make sure Text Wrap is off, and turn on Nonprinting Object in the Attributes palette (or put the frame on a hidden layer), and it’s almost as though this were a “non-object” — the text won’t print, and it won’t affect the ad underneath. But if that advertiser’s name is tagged with a paragraph style, you can include it in the list of advertisers, using the Table of Contents feature (Layout > Table of Contents). You probably want to group it with the ad itself so that if someone moves the ad to a different page, your tag-frame moves, too.
The same trick applies to building a list of pictures in a catalog, or for any other instance where what you want on the list doesn’t actually appear on the page (or doesn’t appear in a way that you can capture in a TOC).
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I had been using non printing text frames for TOC entries for a little while…good tip.
I have a TOC related question, though. Can one copy a TOC style from one document to another? Even when I copy TOC pages to another document, the preset style does not make it over to the new document.
Thanks.
Ken
Ken,
In the Table of Contents Styles dialog, click the “Load” button on the right side to load the TOC recipe from another doc, and you’re good to go!
Thanks Claudia…
Tried it and it works like a champ. It’s great to hang out with smart people.
I hope they add TOC’s from character styles :)
This is a great tip. I’m currently working on a 400-page application that is broken down into about 10 files. Is there a way to make this work across multiple files?
Aaron: Sure, you can put all the files together in a Book palette (File > New > Book) and then generate the TOC across the whole book! Pretty cool.
Ye, sure, but you should be able to take the text in a section title and include it automatically in TOC. The only workaround is (as above) to make non printing text box with the title in it. This is double work, particularly on long docs…
Owen, I’m not sure what you mean. You can take the text from any paragraph that is tagged with a paragraph style. My tip has to do with tagging things like pictures that don’t have any styled paragraph you can “grab.”
I am surprise no one is reporting the huge problems with Indexing and TOC generation with CS2 Books brought over the CS3. Lots of comments on Adobe’s InDesign discussion board but no workaround yet. In my case, Indexing is not working at all. When you generate it, it leaves out lots of entries from the Index pallette and gives other the wrong page numbers. I have not experienced the TOC generation problems that others have reported, but I understand similar things are happening there. This is a big problem for Adobe, it makes CS3 useless for the production of publications with indexes.
Has anyone heard of when this will be fixed or what work-arounds are available, I have a 368-page catalog going to press Aug 20 and a worthless index.
Hi Kevin, sorry, have not been following that issue in the forums. Is it a problem with ID CS2 book files that have been converted to CS3, or *any* CS3 book files?
In general I’d recommend that people finish projects in the same version of the software they started with, if at all possible. But if CS3 is having problems with indexing even new CS3 docs, that advice wouldn’t help either.
My company spent a lot of money upgrading from CS2 to CS3. Unfortunately we started our catalog in CS2 and finished it in CS3 which, from what I read, is where the issue lies. I too am having HUGE problems indexing with CS3. Topics are not showing up, page numbers are wrong and appear in the wrong order.
However, I do have a workaround I’d like to suggest. You have to export all your CS3 files to Adobe’s ‘Interchange” format (.inx), then open each .inx file with CS2, and then do a “Save As” to a CS2 file. The file will lose any templates or styles that are new in CS3, but it should keep all the text and index tags intact. Recreate your book in CS2 and bring in all your newly saved CS2 files. The process was a pain in the *ss, but it worked. All the topics appear and the page numbers are intact and read in the correct order. Once you create your index you can add it back in to your final CS3 book for printing.
Adobe, you’d better fix this issue soon!
Yes, I have heard of a lot of people having troubles with creating indexes in CS3… particularly when indexing a whole book (multiple docs in a book panel). Indexing a single document seems to work better for some folks.
This may need a new thread… I need to generate a “picture credits” list in the backmatter of a book. I would like the information to come from the file info fields on the photos. This is where we record it. I have just cut and pasted manually from the fields after clicking on “get file info” in the links palette. Too time consuming. Is there some way to do this automatically or with a script? (I have never used scripts and sure can’t write one!) And related to this, is there a way to get captions recorded in file info into a document without cut and paste?
The indexing problem in CS3 has me scared. I do lots of books and often need to do indexes. Has the problem been addressed? Should I stick with CS2 for now?
Here’s my question about indexes, if I have the editor tag the index words in the text with a character style (that would be the same style visually as my body text in my doc), can I then use that style to generate the index tags I need to make an index? I am trying to avoid having to the tag all the words myself!
I am having problems the with TOC in CS2. It generates the correct page numbers but no matter what I have tried, switching heading levels by drag and drop or at the level option, when I update the TOC the second heading is above the first heading. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance
Barbara, I’ve found that if the second heading text starts further on the left than the top text, the second (bottom) appears before the first (top) in the TOC. I’ve had to do some fussing with text wrap to get it correct in the TOC. Hope this helps.
Molly
How do you handle the instances where there are multiple instances of the same advertiser on different pages? These would show up as multiple entries for that advertiser one right under another. I know the Index function handles this by putting them all together, but the TOC feature is easier to use with the exception of having the multiple entries.
Is there some sort of GREP find/change that might work in this situation?
If anyone would know, it would be the brilliant minds converging on Indesignsecrets.com.
Thanks for any help here.
when i create the TOC in the 3 rd page. But after exporting the file it is coming at the end of the second page. Please any help me how can i get the toc in the separate page