Indesign - TOC divided in multiple categories

Question

This is something related to the question "Indesign - TOC with one chapter heading, multiple page headings".

I'd like Indesign to generate a TOC like this one:

News

• item 1
• item 2

Culture

• item 4
• item 5

The problem is that my pages are not in order, which means that in the document there might be a News page first, then a Culture one, then another News one. It would be amazing if Indesign could put them automatically under the right category, but I'm not sure if it's possible.

Do you have any advices? Thanks.

Answer 1

Create and apply appropriate styles and you can generate any TOC you like. For example, create paragraph styles Newsitem and Cultureitem to apply to the appropriate kind of heading or first paragraph for each item. For the category headings themselves, News and Culture, if you don't have any real headings on any of your pages, you may have to hide paragraphs that you apply those styles to so you can generate the heading. In setting up the TOC you would just specify that you don't want page numbers for the category level but you do for the item level.

Hope this helps

Answer 2

You can achieve what you are asking using two TOCs. You can create two different TOCs in InDesign using TOC Styles.

To create the News TOC, you can just use the Default Style TOC. In the document, you should set a paragraph style to each entry of the News TOC. And then generate the TOC.

Then, you should create a TOC Style for Culture, and add a paragraph style to each entry in the InDesign document. Then create the second TOC.

Here there is a step-by-step tutorial in case you need to be guided :)