Affinity Publisher: compact table of contents

[Pyanepsion]

Hello everyone.

The book I am working on has 20 chapters and 165 sub-chapters. According to the usual format of one line per page, the table of contents will therefore use about 9 pages (red preview on the right). I would like to reduce this number by indicating the chapter title on one line as usual, but then separating the sub-chapters by a comma (green preview on the left).

Like this.

How do I do this? Thank you for your explanations

[Wosven]

Hello,

Does regular expressions work in the TOC? If so, I would flow out of the page (to avoid adding/removing them), and use a regExp 

Quote

Replace:

^([^\t]+)\t(.+)\n

by:

$1 ($2),

 

Edited September 30, 2021 by Wosven
Added missing "+"

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, Wosven said:

Does regular expressions work in the TOC?

Yes, a regular expression Find/Replace will work within the TOC that you've generated. However, as we know, Find/Replace cannot be easily limited in scope. It will apply to the full document, which makes using it more difficult for this. But it should be possible if you start within the TOC and make sure not to click Replace All. For safety, I would save a copy first  

Also, you will need to redo the Find/Replace if you need to regenerate the TOC. 

[Wosven]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Also, you will need to redo the Find/Replace if you need to regenerate the TOC. 

Yes, but usually, TOC is done at the end (that's the way I work and explain to clients, since articles or titles can move or be modified, and automation need some fine tuning in the end).

Being able to give a scope would be nice.

The usual "replace/find next/replace and find next/replace all" options get all their importance compared to the few APub give. At least when needing to avoid missteps.

[Old Bruce]

I am going to chime in here as a reader. I would much prefer the Large ToC. Perhaps have two Tables of Contents, the small then the larger more detailed one. Again, I am speaking as a reader. Anything that makes my experience of reading easier is better, a ToC with lots of space between the items is easier to read.

Too often as designers we get caught up in minutia and forget about the final customers, not the people who actually hired us, but the people who will be reading / looking at / consuming the book. Occasionally it will help if we point out potential problems for the readers to our paying bosses (who may be unaware of the poor legibility of their favourite font or what ever other thing which they are obsessing over at that moment). 

Having said all that I do know that there are jobs that need to fit into 16 pages and there is no money in the budget for it to be 24 pages. 

[Pyanepsion]

I was hoping that there would be the possibility to set up the sequences of the table of contents.

For the Regex tag, I would have written instead:

^([^\t]+)\t(.{1,})\n
then
, \n

Be careful not to Replace all, otherwise the last item in the series will end with

Quote

item 19 (32), Usual table of content

 

[Wosven]

Oups, my expression missed a "+", no need to write "{1,}", it's the same meaning with less characters!