How to create a table of contents with dotted lines in Illustrator?

Question

My question is basically this one, except the Illustrator version.

I can think of some hackish ways to do it, but I'm thinking maybe there's a proper way to do it, so I figured I'd ask.

Chapter 1
1-1. The table of contents should have dotted lines like this..................4.
1-2. Ideally the dotted lines will resize with the text........................8.
    ◇ Some subset of 1-2 where there are no dotted lines
    ◇ Another subset of 1-2
1-3. And we're back to dotted lines again.....................................16.

Yes, I realize most people will use InDesign for this sort of thing. But it's not on the scale of a "publication"; just an informational PDF. And Illustrator is what I've got to work with.

Answer 1

You do it pretty much the exact same way in Illustrator as one would in InDesign.

Lines should be formatted as: Text Tab PG#.
It can often be helpful to add a space on either side of the tab, but that's not mandatory.

Select the text and then choose Window > Type > Tabs or
hit Ctrl/Command+Shift+T to bring up the Tabs panel.

On the Tabs Panel, insert a right-aligned tab after the page number by clicking the area above the little ruler and be certain the right align option on the panel is selected.
_{(Any of the tab alignment options will work — depends upon the desired alignment of the page numbers.)}

Then insert a period (or any other character) into the Leader field on the panel...

It's also possible to add a period then a space or two, just using the spacebar, to the Leader field to create some distance between the dots. There is a character limit to the Leader field. But, I don't recall what it is exactly. The image above is just the period as a leader, the image below has a period followed by a few spaces for a leader.

Illustrator has no TOC generation functionality like InDesign.
You'll have to manually build any TOC yourself.