Sorting Table of Content

[Andreas S]

I am searching for a way to sort the TOC by Styles used for the entry.  My task in detail is to sort instructions by difficulty, where the instruction chapter has its headline style and the difficulty has its own style.

A TOC is normally sorted by the page numbers of the entries, but in my use case I would need to sort by the difficulty style first (Those difficulty levels should occur only once in theTOC and then the headlines - no matter if sorted by page number or by alphabet.

Does anyone have an idea, how to realize this?

[Old Bruce]

I am trying to figure out what you want. Is this what you want to achieve?
You have three levels of difficulty, Simple, Moderate and Hard. You want to have a ToC with all the listings for 

Simple 
    this._____________________ 12
    that._____________________ 15
    and another one._________ 32 
Moderate 
    some stuff. ______________ 11
    other stuff. ______________ 16
    final stuff. _______________ 24
    
Hard
    example. _________________ 5
    exercise. _________________ 17
    something. _______________ 89
    
Am I close? If so then I think you need to have three sets of Paragraph Styles which are identical except for their names and then you have to set up three ToCs.

[Andreas S]

Hi Bruce,

yes, that is exactly what I want to do.

Thanks for your proposal, this will work ...

[walt.farrell]

What @Old Bruce showed looks more like an Index than a TOC, to me. A single multi-level index could also work, with (for example) parent topic names like "1. Something", "2. Another thing", etc. where the numbers would determine the order of the parent topics in the index.

(However, you can only have 1 index in a document, so if you need both a TOC and an Index I think you need to use Bruce's approach.)

[Andreas S]

Thanks, @Walt!

Well, the whole project is a book and this will definitely need a regular index too. But I'm optimistic and hoping that the guys at Serif are faster implementing an enhancement for multiple indexes than me in writing the book