Combine two paragraph styles in a single TOC entry

Learn / Forums / InDesign Add-ons (Scripts, Scripting, and Plug-ins) / Combine two paragraph styles in a single TOC entry

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    • #98159
      Alberto Gutierrez
      Participant

      Hi All, I have a book with several chapters. Each chapter starts with the usual:

      Chapter number
      Chapter title

      When building the TOC, InDesign allows me to choose which paragraph style to include for each level… but only one. Is there any way to include two paragraph styles in the same entry? like this:

      Chapter number; chapter title

      Thanks!

    • #98160

      Just play with Chapter title and define a new “Chapter title for TOC” with auto-numbering!

      (^/)

    • #98198
      Alberto Gutierrez
      Participant

      Your wisdom great is Obi-wan (read with Yoda voice). Nice trick that of playing with auto numbering in the Chapter title style. The final destination of my book is a reflowable ePub. Anything you change in the generated TOC will not have any effect in the final pub file. So your solution is positive, but if the book has preface, prologue, introduction… the numbering of the chapters will be incorrect. A script or a comercial solution that can merge two paragraph styles in the same TOC entry will be great. ¿Any motivated scripter in the room?. Thanks.

    • #98448
      Aaron Troia
      Participant

      could you create a second paragraph style (or dupilcate it and call it like “title2”) for the prepages? Thats what I tend to do with my front matter where I want ID to split the document but dont want it in the TOC (well I tend to add them, but have them hidden).

      • #98449
        Alberto Gutierrez
        Participant

        Hi Aaron, thanks for your help. Sure, I tend to use a “chapter number” style to split files when exporting the ePub. That style is not included in the TOC, that’s the reason i have to enter manually when editing the code. Long books with looong TOC are a pain in the neck, inserting those “Chapter 1, Chapter 2…” manually.

    • #98914
      Raphael Freeman
      Participant

      So after struggling with this very problem for many many years, the solution that I found to be best was LiveTOC by ID-Extras (https://www.id-extras.com/products/livetoc)

      The idea is that you build your TOC with InDesign’s rather limited tools and then fix manually the toc to look the way you want.

      You then use LiveTOC to basically convert the page number references into hyperlinks so as the page numbers change from draft to draft, the TOC remains up-to-date.

      There was a bit of a learning curve in understanding the principle of how to use it, but once the penny dropped, it has saved me time. Also my clients like that they can check the toc in the pdf by simply clicking on the contents page.

    • #98915
      Alberto Gutierrez
      Participant

      Thanks for the clue Raphael!, i will take a look at LiveTOC to see if it fits my needs.

    • #98916
      Raphael Freeman
      Participant

      My pleasure. When I originally looked into it, I didn’t think it was very useful but I was lucky that the owner/programmer of the company happened to be at my office (he lives quite near me and is a fellow Brit!) and he showed me how it was used. It took me a while to think of solving the problem in his way, but I have been using it ever since!

    • #98989

      Hi,

      I don’t see the relationship with Alberto’s question!! …

      And even less with the comment below! This is exactly what Alberto doesn’t want to do!!

      “The idea is that you build your TOC with InDesign’s rather limited tools and then fix manually the toc to look the way you want.”

      What Alberto wants is a “1-click”!

      (^/) =D

    • #98990

      And here’s a “1-click”! ;-)

      [if the layout moves, just a new click!]

      (^/)

    • #99034
      Raphael Freeman
      Participant

      I don’t know what Alberto wants to do, but I am making the assumption that he is typesetting a book and that every time he sends a draft to the client, he has to update the table of contents. If there are say 10 drafts, then he has to update 10 times.

      The solution that I am suggesting is that he spends a few more minutes on the first version of the table of contents (and yes he can use grep searches to fix up the table of contents more quickly) but on each subsequent draft he doesn’t have to do anything.

      I used to make a series of grep searches, save them in multifind/change and then on each draft, regenerate the table of contents and rerun the set of grep searches. This method is much faster.

    • #99043

      “I don’t know what Alberto wants to do …”

      Thanks for the comment! ;-)

      (^/)

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