Creation of Table of Contents — Adjustable interface window (width and height)

When working in huge and very complex documents — with dozens and dozens of paragraph styles and very complex table of contents —, the limitations of the interface window are rather annoying. The window cannot namely be expanded to have a better view of the selected styles.

The number of visible styles is namely limited to four (see screenshot). And the width cannot be adjusted either.

It would thus be a considerable improvement if the window size could be customized in order to have a much better view of the styles one is working with. This would definitely help speed up the work process.

The window size should be customizable both in width and height of course.

Thanks.

Please develop some kind of External Style file format, that can be applied locally, and hopefully, via the cloud. But at least locally, PLEASE.

It is a crime that InDesign currently has NO WAY whatsoever to keep multiple documents styles synced. I run into this deeply frustrating problem all the time.

Currently, If I create a template file with some styles, and use that to create documents, and then If I update or refine paragraph styles, character styles, table styles, etc — there is no way for me to easily carry over those same styles to all other documents that are using those same styles.

This is deeply insane.
Please. PLEASE. It is 2019. Fix this.

Styles should work like external Sketch file library updates do. They should work like External CSS code. It should be possible to update a style in one document and push that style update to ALL documents using that Style Library.

When applying paragraph styles throughout a document, it is only possible to select multiple continuous paragraphs in one go. If I want to style all first level headings, for example, I have to click on each, apply the paragraph style and repeat and repeat and repeat... Often finding the appropriate style requires scrolling in the paragraph styles window. It would be very useful, and much quicker, to be able to select all headings and apply Head A (or whatever) in one click. This might be achieved by clicking in the paragraphs with a keyboard combination pressed or, as was done in Ventura, with a separate tool.

When creating a nested style, the only options we have for its activation point are [through] or [up to] . This means they're designed to have an affect only at the START of a paragraph, and to work only from left to right. This is very inflexible, and it's frustrating to work around, especially if we want particular style variation to occur somewhere at the END of paragraph.

It would be really helpful if in addition to the two existing options, you added ones like [after] or [after first instance of] or [after nth instance of] or [before last instance of] [after last instance of].

This would allow painless styling of things that occur at the END of a paragraph, like an endmark, or icon, or closing quotation mark for example.

1) Please make the TOC dialogue box scaleable: especially the include paragraph styles box is unmanageable (long names are not visible and after applying settings to a style it scrolls back to the top of the list)
2) Please include option to strip or override character styles in TOC
At the moment you need a lot of paragraph styles to set up the TOC, especially when having multicoloured headlines, both in document and TOC
3) Please give text boxes an option "include in TOC" (helpful when having the same headline on several pages) and the option to enter alternate wording and line breaks. For easier formatting of the TOC it would be great to have the possibility to make groups (chapters)

The new paragraph shading feature would be fantastic to use for laying out text message conversations in books, but needs a few tweaks to make is fully functional. Text messages in books is becoming very common.

It used to be that you had to create shapes and anchor each in for a text message. Now you can use Paragraph Shading defined in the style for left side texts with no adjustments, but because right side text messages need to have the "bubble" shape aligned right, but the interior text left aligned. My solution is (see sample file):
Create three base paragraph styles:
1. <leftsidetext>: Defined: All text styling, right/left indents, alignments, and space above/below, etc.
2. <rightsidetext>: Defined: Based on <leftsidetext>, but remove left/right indents
3. <rightsidetextalign>: Defined: Based on <rightside_text>, but change to align flush right, add right indent 18pt, turn off paragraph shading.

Next steps:
1. Cut out all the rightsidetext and create a standalone text frame for each text.
2. Create (or leave) empty returns where each right side text was and apply <rightsidealign> to the return.
3. Paste the text frames into the empty returns where appropriate to anchor frame.
4. Select each frame and apply the Object style (Text Message Right in sample file attached).

Could there be a way to separately control the shading alignment from the interior text alignment within the paragraph style? Much like how text functions within a div?