Equivalent to, "Insert Leader" (fill space with periods or other characters)?

[ehbowen]

Back when I was learning the basics of cold type, on a Compugraphic 8600 which now can be seen on The Flintstones, there was a very useful command/key known as "insert leader." It would insert periods, or some other character of your choosing, between text items in order to fill all of the space on a line. Just the thing for what you need for a Table of Contents.

My book designer apparently had a command like that in InDesign, for he had the Table of Contents with the chapter headings flush left, the page numbers flush right, and the space in between filled with repeating periods. But, after I approved the file and paid him, I found some minor items elsewhere which needed alteration and made the changes in Affinity Publisher.

Now, when I export the file to PDF, the inserted periods in the Table of Contents are all gone and the page numbers are hard up against the various chapter headings. And I didn't touch the ToC when I made my edits! I've looked for an equivalent command in Affinity Publisher, but as yet I'm not seeing it. Can anyone assist?

[MikeTO]

The TOC needs to be replaced - it would have imported as static text and not as a dynamic TOC. Text will have reflowed in the document because ID and Publisher have different text flow engines so the TOC won't be accurate now.

It's easy to create a dot leader with Publisher. The default TOC formatting right-aligns the numbers without a dot leader but you can add one in just a couple of steps. Please see the TOC and Tab sections of the free Publisher manual I've shared in this forum (link is below in my signature). In summary, set the tab stop to right align, choose the dot leader character, and in the More popup, set it to 0 from right. You can also set the tab stop position to a specific value, but it's easier to use 0 from right.

Good luck

[Dicekai]

For anyone still looking for this, it's under paragraph. Change the symbol to "glyph" for periods. Use shift+tab to insert it (just happened to try it and it worked lol)



Edit: For TOC Specifically, (make sure style name has page numbers turned on under TOC tab)

Edited May 4 by Dicekai
Added TOC function specifics, not manually making TOC