Allow character style to affect tab leaders
I applied a tab leader in my paragraph style in order to force dots to appear between my text and page number in my table of contents. However, there is no way to style those leaders. InDesign manual says: To change the font or other formatting of the tab leader, select the tab character in the text frame, and use the Character panel or Type menu to apply formatting.
This is fine except when you have a really long table of contents and want to format each tab leader. I chose a smaller dot by choosing a light font and had to manually change each line. A lot of work! Can we have a choice of style or character for the tab leader like we do for bullet point marker?
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Jason
commented
Automatic character style for Table of Contents leader does exist, you must use the Table of Contents feature in InDesign. To do this you must generate your TOC through this feature, which is worth learning... Here's how to do the leading, skip to steps 5. and 6. if you are already familiar with the Table of Contents tool
1. Create the desired character style for your leading, and name it TOC Leading or whatever works.
2. Go to Layout > Table of Contents Styles to create a style for your table of contents.
3. Use the Add and Remove buttons to select and activate the paragraph styles you would like the TOC to pull from the document and use as entries in the TOC when using this TOC Style. Any text using these styles will appear as entries.
4. Under each of the styles you've chosen to be used in the TOC, you can apply paragraph and character styles from your main styles list. This is how the text it pulls will appear in the TOC you generate. I suggest you create specific Paragaph styles for each of your TOC Levels and include tabs and indents here.
5. Click More Options... button. Now you can create hierarchy levels (level 2 nests under level 1, etc) and set up page number/leading styling. In this expanded menu, you can style the way you want the page number to appear in the TOC (make a character style for this too) as well as any characters you want to appear between the TOC Entry and page number.
6. To set up the leader you want, In the box for "Between Entry and Number" put ">t" for tab and select the TOC Leading Character style you made earlier.
7. Once you're done with this and any TOC style set up you wanted, click OK and go to the page in your document where you want your TOC. Go to Layout > Table of Contents... to generate your TOC. You'll have to tweak the TOC style a bit to get it how you want, usually. To apply your changes to the styles, you have go to Layout>Update Table of Contents... every time to see the changes.
Hope that helps any google travellers who may arrive here down the line
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Ismael Lavallee
commented
This is a really great idea, i'm working on a phonebook at the moment and, the names are light and the numbers are bold. you can see how much work this can be. it would be nice to set the tab leaders with a character style.