TOC advanced setup – NEWBIE NEEDS HELP!!

You could set your TOC up like normal, so they are all on their own lines. And once the TOC is generated, you could do a find and replace.

Find: DAY 1 [paragraph return]
Change to: Day 1 [space]

Find: The content for Day 1 [paragraph return]
Change to: The content for Day 1 [space]

Find: Book reference [paragraph return]
Change to: Book reference [space]

Save each of those Find/Changes so you don’t have to keep setting them up. If it’s something you’ll need to update a lot, I’d get the Find/Change by List script, so it will run this sequentially for you.

Kelly that looks OK but the wording would need to be exact or this will not work.
I would do it with a GREP find and replace and use wildcards and paragraph formats to the do this.

Create the TOC with each level using the Paragraph Style used in the document you will use this to find the level you want to change.
The SUB HEADING is not being changed so set its format how you want it in the TOC dialogue box.

For each step set in the FIND/CHANGE dialogue box the Paragraph Style of the level you want to change and run the GREP find change just on the TOC story or you will change somethings you don’t want to.
Do these steps in order or they will not work.

First Step

Find Paragraph Style – eg CONTENTS FOR DAY
Find
(.+)(\t\d+~b)
Replace
$1

Second Step
Find Paragraph Style – eg DAY
Replace Paragraph Style – eg TOC
Find
(.+)(\t\d+~b)
Replace
$1

Hope this works for you.
If you have any problems please send some examples.

Good luck Evita.
Just a note my method will remove the page number references from the end of the two of the lines that are combined and then leave the last one.
So create your TOC with the page numbers and the FInd and Replace will take care of the rest.

So, if I understand the problem, you have:
SUB HEADING ONE
DAY 1 The Content for day 1 here Book reference here #
DAY 2 The Content for day 2 here Book reference here #
DAY 3 The Content for day 3 here Book reference here #
SUB HEADING TWO
DAY 4 The Content for day 4 here Book reference here #
DAY 5 The Content for day 5 here Book reference here #
DAY 6 The Content for day 6 here Book reference here #

Where the actual text on the referred-to page is The content for day X, and then you want the page number to appear?

One dirty trick might be to put the text you want to appear in the TOC also on the page you are referring to, but in white (or whatever is invisible). Formatting and alignment would be a bit tricky, but I’ve used similar techniques to have something to refer to that is not actually visible.

Putting a second copy of the text hidden on the page is a lot to manage manually and prone to errors and oversights.
Also if you are doing all the work you might as well do a manual TOC.
But if you want to do this then you can make the text visible in a text box that just extends onto the page and most of the text is on the pasteboard, this way you can see the text bit it will not print with the document but is still part of the page the TOC will pick it up.

Better to create the TOC from the headers on the pages and then process the result into the format required with a GREP Find/Replace.

Graham Park you are right that it could be a bit tricky. Personally I like grep but not everyone does. When I’ve used “hidden” text I do it with a special char stye, so I can make it visible easily.

In the past, I have, only once in a while, had InDesign produce a badly blown-up corrupted PDF. When I went through the InDesign file(s) I would find stuff on the artboards but not on the page. Removing them made InDesign behave. Yes, it “shouldn’t” matter, and because I don’t do it I have not see it happen recently. But several years ago I had a colleague who kept tripping over this, umm, ‘feature’. I dunno, maybe Adobe has fixed it, and I am not saying it always happens, but if the PDF is not right, clean your artboards…..