Table of Contents Right Stand off

[Seneca]

As far as I can tell Publisher doesn't offer any way of controlling the stand off between text and page numbers in TOC.

Ideally we should have another triangle at the top right of the text ruler to control that. inDesign has these options.

I'm thinking of Right Indent, analogous to the Left Indent that's already there.

 

[walt.farrell]

If I understand what you want, you can control it in two ways:

1. Preferred: Note that the text for a Heading 1 entry has text style TOC Heading 1 (and, similarly, Heading 2 is Toc Heading 2). Note, too, that your separator (by default) is a Tab. From the Text Styles panel you can edit those styles (or even better, define your own based on them), and in the Tab Stops section you can specify where you want the tab stop to be located.
2. (Not preferred) View > Show Text Ruler, then select a Toc Entry, and click on the top part of the text ruler where you want the tab stop to be. You will need to do this separately for each heading level, in my experience. Note that if you regenerate/refresh the TOC the tab stops will be lost. That makes approach one the preferred one, in my opinion.
    

[Seneca]

16 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

in the Tab Stops section you can specify where you want the tab stop to be located

Hi @walt.farrell,

I'm not sure whether I understand you in my turn.

I want to achieve the following and a simple tab stops won't do, I'm afraid.

I don't want to resort to soft line breaks to force-wrap text to another line. I should be able to set it up and back it up by a TOC style, obviously.

But as far as I can tell this is not possible at the moment, unless, as I said earlier, I completely missed your solution.

 

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for the clarification. You asked about a standoff between the text and the number, which the tab stop setup provides.

But I didn't understand that what you wanted was a standoff between the text and the right-edge of the text frame. I interpreted your first post as wanting to adjust where the number occurs. I will have to look into that some more, but you may be right that it's not something Publisher provides today.

[Seneca]

On 11/26/2018 at 1:22 PM, Seneca said:

As far as I can tell Publisher doesn't offer any way of controlling the stand off between text and page numbers in TOC.

I'm just refreshing this issue in this post because it seems to me that it's an important addition to text control in Publisher, particularly when it comes to formatting Table of Contents and the like.

[dominik]

1 hour ago, Seneca said:

I'm just refreshing this issue in this post because it seems to me that it's an important addition to text control in Publisher, particularly when it comes to formatting Table of Contents and the like.

I looked around in the paragraph formating options and could not find a solution to this. Would a value called 'First Line Right Indent' be the right aproach?

d.

[MikeW]

4 minutes ago, dominik said:

I looked around in the paragraph formating options and could not find a solution to this. Would a value called 'First Line Right Indent' be the right aproach?

d.

Likely not. If one person has a two-line TOC entry, another person may have a three- or four-line entry. So a Right Text Indent may be the answer if only the paragraph style used in the body that is pulled into the TOC is affected and not the page number entry.

[walt.farrell]

For what Seneca wants I think the setting would have to apply to all lines of text except the last. Or possibly to all of the text, but not to the number that follows the text.

[MikeW]

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

For what Seneca wants I think the setting would have to apply to all lines of text except the last. Or possibly to all of the text, but not to the number that follows the text.

Tis what I wrote.

[dominik]

4 minutes ago, MikeW said:

So a Right Text Indent may be the answer if only the paragraph style used in the body that is pulled into the TOC is affected and not the page number entry.

This makes sense. Thank you. I didn't think of longer entries reaching over more than two lines.

Then this be part of further refinement of the paragraph styling options in the future.

d.

[MikeW]

5 minutes ago, dominik said:

This makes sense. Thank you. I didn't think of longer entries reaching over more than two lines.

Then this be part of further refinement of the paragraph styling options in the future.

d.

Personally, I would edit the titles themselves and not run into this exact issue...At least in the past I cannot remember ever having more than a single-line TOC entry.

But then, options are always great!

[Seneca]

14 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Personally, I would edit the titles themselves and not run into this exact issue

It's unlikely that any title would run for more than 2 lines. And that's why I think that the right indent would solve 99% of cases.

[dominik]

22 minutes ago, Seneca said:

It's unlikely that any title would run for more than 2 lines. And that's why I think that the right indent would solve 99% of cases.

Actually, a little while ago I did a thesis that had some quite long titles. From a test with this particular text I came to the conclusion that such a long project (300+ pages) could be done in APub to about 80 to 90%. The TOC was quite good. What is missing is ankered objects and footnotes (as we all know  ).

d.

[Old Bruce]

On 11/26/2018 at 6:27 AM, Seneca said:

I don't want to resort to soft line breaks to force-wrap text to another line. I should be able to set it up and back it up by a TOC style

I am of the school that says we have to not just get the book/magazine/thesis out the door but make it legible and comprehensible, and part of that means sometimes the arbitrary automatic 'line breaks' will result in a poorly understood Table of Contents.

You could set up the Paragraph style to give the following result,

On 11/26/2018 at 6:27 AM, Seneca said:

I would rather break after "... that needs" so "some space" is kept together. Heck I would maybe even break after "... long title". Every job is a "Pick two; Good, Cheap, Fast" type job. A customer chooses Cheap and Fast they get the long line in the Table of Contents if they pick Good and Cheap it'll take a while, the not cheap customers take precedence.

I guess what I am saying is that if we could do this sort of thing with a style I would most likely be disappointed in the results and wind up doing the work by hand most of the time anyway.

 

[Seneca]

5 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

You could set up the Paragraph style to give the following result

No you can't, not at the moment. You can do in inDesign but not in Publisher.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Seneca said:

No you can't, not at the moment. You can do in inDesign but not in Publisher.

Actually, the right-indent can be accomplished by appropriate settings in the paragraph style used for the TOC entries. 

However, when I did that I ended up with the page number left-aligned rather than right-aligned, and I haven't found a setting to fix that.

[Seneca]

16 hours ago, Seneca said:

You can do in inDesign but not in Publisher.

I'm not talking about a pie in the sky here. I've been doing this in inDesign for donkeys years.

Here are 2 screenshots of inDesign Table of Contents. It doesn't matter how many lines the headings run into. It's handled as expected.

Let's leave it at that.

 

[Woodpig]

I'm still getting issues with this (see attached), but I assume there's been a workaround developed since this was 5 years ago. Can someone please point me to that, if it exists?

[walt.farrell]

54 minutes ago, Woodpig said:

I'm still getting issues with this (see attached),

Sorry, but I'm not sure what you want to change in that TOC. Can you describe the problem, or highlight it in some way? I can think of a couple of possibilities, and would prefer not to guess.

[Woodpig]

Apologies, Walt. It's the wrapping of the text over two lines - I want to shorten the first line, but when I try, the page number is no longer right aligned.