TOC confusion
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I’m finding some very strange behavior in CC 2019. I’m doing a book for a client. She has 6 chapters, each with a chapter number and a chapter title. And she wants to put a bit of text below the chapter title in the TOC, text that doesn’t actually appear in the body of the chapter (sort of an abstract of the chapter). I set up the TOC to include the frontmatter headings (TOC1), the chapter title (TOC2) and the abstract (TOC3). I made TOC2 a numbered list so I can have the chapter numbers without actually including them in the TOC styles. The abstract of each chapter I put at the head of each chapter in a separate text frame on a hidden layer. When I created the TOC, the abstract of chapter 3 was appearing directly after the abstract of chapter 2. After much hair pulling, I discovered that the abstract of each chapter would not appear in the right place (under its chapter title in the TOC) unless the text frame containing the abstract on the hidden layer was placed on the right side of the spread. Some chapters start on the right (like chapter 1), some don’t (like chapter 2). If a chapter begins on an even page, I have to move the abstract to the opposite side of the spread. This makes no sense to me.
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Hi Clark,
did you assign the right level in the TOC style?
I mean level 1 to TOC1, level 2 to TOC 2 and level 3 to TOC 3, so that the TOC will be correctly nested.Another question is: do the text frames with the abstract touch the pages, this is important for InDesign to assign the correct page in the TOC.
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Clark,
For as long as can I remember, Indesign always acted that way.If I had to deal with this kind of situation, I would put the “abstract” in the text flow, after H2, then choose one of the following workaround:
– Make the “abstract” paragraph style invisible (0.1 pt size – 0 leading – 1% h&v scaling – -1000 approach and no color – no space before/after).
Cons: It makes thinks hard to edit and you’ll have to use the story editor.– Or, set all “abstract” paragraphs as conditional text. Update TOC, then hide conditional text.
Cons: don’t forget to set the paragraph returns as conditional (Find/Replace could be helpful there). And of course, you have to follow the right order: update TOC, then hide.I prefer the “conditional text” workaround. Less dirty :-)
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Thanks. I would be concerned that “invisible” text would become visible once this is exported as an ePub. Putting each abstract text frame on the right side of the spread works ok. It’s just puzzling. Generally, one of the nice things about ID is that when something goes wrong there’s usually a logical reason. I’m just not seeing it here.
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