CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • October 23, 2019 at 1:52 pm #1192453
    Jennifer Maison

    Member

    I created a table of contents and set up a tab with a “.” leader. It looks great, except the spacing between the end of each word and the leader is not evenly spaced. On some lines it is flush with the end of the word, on other lines it looks like there are two or three spaces. I turned on overprint preview to make sure that there were no extra spaces. I also tried changing the font, font size, and alignment but none of those things worked. Has anyone else experienced the problem of their looking like there are extra spaces? Is there a fix?

  • October 23, 2019 at 1:58 pm #14323881
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Hi! Yes! I have had the same problem! Are you bringing in the “Table of Contents” information from a .csv file or tab-delimited .txt file? Sometimes there are extra spaces in the excel doc that causes it. So you could check that file……

    Or maybe just copy and paste one of the lines that look right (and see if that will hold the correct spacing), then just change the text. Does that make sense?

  • October 23, 2019 at 2:14 pm #14323880
    Jennifer Maison

    Member

    The document was created in indesign, so no issues could be due to importing text. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the character that is last in the line. Some of the lines end in a close parenthesis, but not all of them are unevenly spaced. Same with lines that end in specific letters – like if the line ends with an “s”, some are spaced ok, others not. I tried to copy/paste a working line and the space still showed up. It appears that the spacing of the leader aligns at the right, but leaves extra space at the left after the letters because all of the leader characters need to be evenly spaced.

  • October 23, 2019 at 2:17 pm #14323879
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I agree! I just checked one of our indexes and there are additional spaces on some and not on others, depending on the content of the line. Weird! Do you think that this is something that only people like us will see? I know I am anal and try to get everything perfect, but sometimes…..

  • October 23, 2019 at 2:25 pm #14323878
    Jennifer Maison

    Member

    I definately think that most people won’t notice, but someone checking the document with a fine tooth comb for errors did. I think it will be fine.

  • October 23, 2019 at 2:27 pm #14323877
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I hate when I see something like that and I can’t fix it! ;-)

  • October 23, 2019 at 3:46 pm #14323876
    Tim Murray

    Member

    On mine the dots line up vertically. They start their line-up on the right, then keep their pairings all the way to the left as far as they can go. They “keep”, if you will, their line up (this certainly won’t line up right, but you should get the point):
    This line line 1 ……………………..16
    Line 2 …………………………………17
    so the for line 2 the dot furthest to left would be where it would be if there were a matching dot above it. BUT, you may have an extra space at the end of a paragraph, which will bump the first dot too far to the right.

  • October 23, 2019 at 4:38 pm #14323875
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    As Tim said: the dots line up starting at the right edge. So no, there’s no “fix” for making them match on the left (if you use tab leaders). This is how it has always worked and bazillions of books have been set that way.

    However, you could probably find other ways to create the dot leaders, such as inserting an anchored frame, or an anchored line.

    More info here:
    https://indesignsecrets.com/why-cant-i-get-dot-leaders-to-line-up.php

  • October 24, 2019 at 2:20 am #14323873
    Vinny –

    Member

    My two cents:
    Forget about tab leaders!
    Use underlining instead. Add a fixed space before and after the tab in the TOC options.
    Use grep styles in order to apply the “underlining” character style to tab.
    You should be good to go: first and last dots in a fixed position and adjusting spaces between dots.
    You might want to create a custom stroke if you want to get better control over the dots spacing.

    View post on imgur.com

    • September 20, 2022 at 3:04 am #14372386
      Shlomit Heymann

      Member

      Thank you Vinny!
      What a wonderful solution!
      Shlomit

  • October 24, 2019 at 8:19 am #14323872
    Jennifer Maison

    Member

    Thank you all for your input. Vinny, I implemented your idea and my TOC looks perfect now. Thank you!

• Author
  Posts