Indesign - list of figures out of order in table

Question

I wonder if you can help....

I have an InDesign document. A fairly regular document, some text with lots of images. This is how I want it to appear.

I created this document and then added a list of figures ot the end of the document, exactly as you would a table of contents.

However, the image titles do not appear in the expected order. I thought they would follow the order of the automatic numbering being applied by the paragraph style, starting at 1 and following through sequentially to 12.

But, my images were listed in this order; 1,4,7,10,2,5,8,11,3,6,9,12.

A quick search online tells me that the document is being read in the order of the blue line here. That this is how InDesign works.

This is a problem. The images as placed follow a narrative, but the only solution I could find is to renumber the images, going from 1-4 down the first column, 2-8 down the next etc. This does not follow the narrative of the images as placed & looks weird and unprofessional.

My question then is, how do I get to place my images per first image here, and have them appear in the right order in my List of Figures at the end of my document?

Any insight would be very much appreciated. Thanks, Tim

Answer 1

I believe for InDesign to understand the correct order of the image captions to use in a table of contents, you need to have the text frames linked together. This will also make it possible to use automatic numbering.

We've discussed just linking the text frames with the captions, but it turns out to be too messy to work with. The captions might shift so they aren't below the corresponding images.

I propose having the images part of the text flow as well. When pasted into a text frame they become Anchored Objects.

There are some disadvantages to this method, but the big advantage is that if you remove or add an image, all the other images will automatically flow into place.

If all images are the same size, as you show in your sketch, it should be pretty easy to create a tight set of text frames to hold both the images and the captions.

In your case you'll need 4 horizontal text frames per page with each 3 columns. They should be linked together.

Make a paragraph style for the paragraph containing the image and a paragraph style for the caption.

The size of the frames makes sure the positioning is correct. If your captions can be several lines, you might need to use Keep Options to force the image paragraph to always start in the next column.

Alternatively, you could also just use one big text frame and have a "spacer" paragraph style set to Span All Columns to make the "line breaks". This is however a bit unstable and buggy in my experience. Doesn't always behave as expected.

You should consider using Object Styles for the text frame and the anchored images, so you can easily adjust the layout automatically. I won't go into details with this here.