Heyyyyyy there, it's me, just here chillin in almost 2024, STILL manually restyling my entire TOC for the hundredth time just because my page numbering changed slightly....wondering how your 6-year+ review process is going on this suggestion?

I've attached a screenshot showing just one example of how the auto-generated TOC is rarely usable "as-is" without some manual tweaking. You can see the "Digital, Social, and Mobile..." line is too long. If we adjust this line manually (in ANY way), our adjustment will simply get thrown out the next time we use "Update TOC" to update the page numbers. Now imagine this in a huge book that is constantly reflowing, and/or in a more complex TOC where you may want to break the generated text into sections or apply colors or do anything creative. It's a complete nightmare having to redesign the whole TOC over and over again.

What we need is for you to rework the TOC creation feature so that instead of just outputting basic "dumb" text into a text box, it outputs some sort of intelligent "wrapper" around the text that understands even if we adjust the formatting of a TOC item on the TOC page, it still remains "connected" to its page number reference. Then add a feature to "soft update" the TOC—meaning update the page numbers only, without losing any of our existing custom formatting. This is what the original request here is asking for.

Still wishing in 2022...

I am formatting a book right now, Jan of 2021 and this is STILL an issue. This truly needs to be fixed, it is such a hassle to have to reformat the TOC entirely.

Still wishing for this in 2021.

Unfortunately, it appears this is still an issue in 2020. I just had to update the font size in my book after receiving my proof and when I did this I lost about 50 pages from the design. Having to redo the text on the ToC again. Seems there is still no way to update just the page numbers. Can we please have this feature?

I agree, have a feature where the user can update the page numbers only. It's irritating to have to update the whole TOC everytime. If MS Word can do it, I am sure the Adobe team can figure something out.

How and WHY is this still not a thing.
Simply update the pagenumbers I don't want to have to redo the custom table of content look and feel.
A title in the document looks different than the title in table of content. ... guys

I have to make manual updates to the Table of Contents to get it how it needs to be. So just being able to update the page numbers would be very useful, and would save me a lot of time.

Please! It would be great update the page numbers only, not the formatting, and not the paragraph/character styles. I agree that in this instance Word is way ahead of InDesign, unfortunately. It's also clunky having to manually update the bookmarks if you change any of the copy in the TofC.

exactly what Tomasz says.

I think, we all would love if we can update ONLY the page numbers, nothing more - just as it is in Word f.e.

The ability to strip Forced Line Breaks would be a huge help!
But going further, the (optional) ability to strip out even Character Styles would be helpful.

Hi Florin. This is a great idea and it should be very simple for Indesign team to implement it: put cross references instead of the plain page numbers in your TOC. I replace them every time, it takes a bit of time but well worth it in most cases. Of course only when you dont have a very long TOC. Also there are a few scripts that does this, but you have to pay for them.

@RY
Kind of. but just the page numbers. (because i often must manipulate the entrys (not the numbers) )

So basically you want a table of contents that does live updates?