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I'm creating a newspaper for a small association, and have run in to a problem when creating the ToC. The paper has a few different types of articles; "Info", "General news", Articles on this issue's theme and Buy&Sell.

Each page has the type of the page's article in the header, and then a title (and a bunch of text). Now I want to create a ToC which lists the articles grouped by type, something like this:

Info
    Editorial                     1
    Meeting minutes               3
General news
    Article 1                     2
    Article 2                    10
This month's theme
    On the greatness of themes    4
    They are really fantastic     6
Buy&Sell
    Stuff for sale                8
    I want to buy a...            9

Note that the article types are not necessarily on consecutive pages.

I created a Table of Content style which has the page header paragraph style (eg General news) as Level 1 content, and the title style as Level 2. Now, if I generate a ToC, I will get for each page an entry for the page type, and for pages on which an article begins also the title of that article. Something like this:

Info
    Editorial                     1
General news
    Article 1                     2
Info
    Meeting minutes               3
This month's theme
    On the greatness of themes    4
This month's theme
This month's theme
    They are really fantastic     6
This month's theme
Buy&Sell
    Stuff for sale                8
Buy&Sell
    I want to buy a...            9
General news
    Article 2                    10

This has two problems, first that they are not grouped, and second that since the page header is on every page, it will have an entry for each header, even if there is no new article on that page.

If I update the Level 1 style to be "Sort entries in alphabetical order" I get somewhat closer:

Buy&Sell
    Stuff for sale                8
Buy&Sell
    I want to buy a...            9
General news
    Article 1                     2
General news
    Article 2                    10
Info
    Editorial                     1
Info
    Meeting minutes               3
This month's theme
    On the greatness of themes    4
This month's theme
This month's theme
    They are really fantastic     6
This month's theme

But still the types are not grouped. Is the Table of Contents feature powerful enough to do this?

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  • For clarity's sake, which version of InDesign are you using?
    – Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum
    Jun 18, 2012 at 1:10
  • It's for InDesign CS6
    – carlpett
    Jun 25, 2012 at 15:23

1 Answer 1

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You may have to cheat a bit with the styles and have two identical Page Header styles, one which is called Page Header and one which is Page Header TOC. Then you only apply Page Header TOC on the first instance (or whatever instance you want to include in the TOC), and the others are just Page Header.

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  • Hi, thanks (and sorry for being late with reply). However, this does not really take care of the grouping issue, right? I also noted that text included via a master page is not picked up, is there any way around that except opening the text for override on all pages?
    – carlpett
    Jun 25, 2012 at 15:28

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