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Bringhurst Page 36 style TOC alignment


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I am manually creating a manual table of contents within Affinity Publisher. I am trying to follow the second example seen at the top of page 36 of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. (Fourth Edition, version 4.2)

His example has a list of referenced names and the page numbers joined with a dot, with the line centered around the dot.

It is not clear to me if I can do this with a paragraph style alone. Alternatively, I think it might be necessary to use a paragraph style in combination with two text styles. One character style for the left hand content, and one text style for the right hand content.

I pretty much have to do this manually because Affinity Publisher still lacks proper page reference support for what I am trying to do. Elsewhere in the document I am using an auto-generated TOC with default character styles. I am avoiding changing those styles for now, even though Bringhurst would hate them.

For your amusement here is a relevant quote from page 35 of Bringhurst:

"Lists, such as contents pages and recipes, are opportunities to build architectural structures in which the space between the elements both separates and binds. The two favorite ways of destroying such an opportunity are setting great chasms of space that the eye cannot leap without help from the hand, and setting unenlightening rows of dots (dot leaders, they are called) that force the eye to walk the width of the page like a prisoner being escorted back to his cell."

Trying not to be guilty of that!

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My copy of Bringhurst was lost in a bit of a flood about twenty years back. I am not  sure what you are wanting, perhaps you could just show an example by using spaces something like the following?

 referenced names      .         9

A Word                              .    123

in case the text doesn't survive different browsers

1035545141_ScreenShot2022-06-01at11_39_54AM.png.27894a1d3ca6568e4df1d4bbbf20559c.png

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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I figured it out. The answer is tab stops. Starts on the 3rd page of the attached PDF.

I have four new Paragraph styles.

ETOC1, ETOC2, ETOC3, and ETOC3Centered.

ETOC3 has two tab stops with the dot as the separator on one of them. This did the trick.

There are also some character styles which are used to add color here and there, but those are ancillary to solution.

The affinity publisher provided youtube video on tabs was very helpful.

The initial index is still the standard one, so Bringhurst would still hate that one. 

 

ExerciseIndexTest2LeSSExecutiveWorkshopHandouts.pdf

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It is built manually. I don’t know to what extent the automated TOC format could be tweaked this way. The tab characters might be a problem for the index generator. Tweaking the TOC paragraph styles to add tab stops should  be straightforward as they are presumably just standard paragraph styles.

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