InDesign TOC - indent text form right, when already using the 'right indent tab' option in table of contents

Question

I have a table of contents. I have good control and understanding of it. Except when there are very long section titles, like this:

I use 'right indent tab' when formulating a table of contents. So page numbers are stuck to the right side of the text box. In the example above you will see that the section title on page 5 runs onto next line, causing the text to run into the page numbering. I have tried playing with indentation in paragraph style, and tabs. But to no avail, this is my current set up.

What I want to achieve is to push the text in from the right, so that the numbering and section titles remain separated, but still use 'right indent tab' when formulating the table of contents. Something like this:

I hope that's clear, happy to clarify any of the above if useful.

Answer 1

The trick is to set a Right Indent and counter it with an equivalent negative Last Line Indent.

You might get a problem with the last line being longer than the others. To avoid that you could make two tabs instead of one. The first is left-justified and placed 30 mm (or whatever you choose) to the left of the width of the frame and the other is right-justified and placed at the width of the frame like the one you have now.

Answer 2

Not sure if this would work, but worth a shot: try to use Balance Ragged Lines on the specific paragraph style you use for the TOC entries.

Otherwise I have had the same issue a few times, so I just manually added forced line breaks into the long titles. Presumably you won't have too many of these to fix manually.