Process instructions

Project overview

The challenge

Writers were manually building and maintaining TOCs in InDesign, which caused inconsistent layouts and wasted formatting time.

My strategy

I wrote a standardized process guide so everyone on the team knew how to apply heading styles and automatically generate dynamic TOCs.

Writing sample

Add a table of contents

With InDesign, you can generate a table of contents based on the styles defined in the document. It is automatically generated and can be quickly updated anytime you make changes to the document

Apply Paragraph Styles

To tell InDesign what content should be included in the table of contents, apply paragraph styles to your text.

Place your cursor in the paragraph.
From Paragraph Styles, select a style.
(Window / Styles / Paragraph Styles)

Generate a Table of Contents

Open the Table of Contents window.
(Layout / Table of Contents)
Define Heading:

Title: Enter heading text.
Style: Select a style to format the heading text.

Select Contents:

Styles in Table of Contents: Select the styles (in hierarchical order) to include.
Style: With a style selected in Style in Table of Contents, select a style to format the entry.

Click OK.
Your cursor is loaded with the table of contents.
Place the table of contents in your document.

Note: Continue to work on your document. Select Layout / Update Table of Contents to update.

Impact & takeaways

Eliminated human error and ensured consistency across documents.
Saved time because the TOCs automatically updated when changing the document.
Preserved hyperlinks when creating PDFs.
Normalized process for all team members.

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