Using Multiple Tables of Contents in InDesign

When it comes to long or complex InDesign documents—textbooks, catalogs, anthologies, magazines, and many others—one table of contents often isn’t enough to help your readers quickly and easily find the content they need.

InDesign’s ability to generate TOCs is powerful, but did you realize you can create and manage multiple TOCs in a single document, each tracking different types of content? You can!

With a little planning and a few best practices, you can produce clean, functional, and attractive TOCs that elevate the navigability and utility of your publications. I’ll show you how.

Why You Might Need Multiple TOCs

Here are just a few practical examples of when having more than a single table of contents can be helpful:

• Tables of Figures or Table of Illustrations: A quick reference to visual elements is ideal for technical books or academic journals.
• Tables Index: When working with data-rich documents, a separate list of tables can help readers locate specific datasets.
• Sidebar or Feature Lists: Magazines, textbooks, and marketing collateral often include sidebars, callouts, or highlighted features that deserve their own index.
• Contributor Bios TOC: Anthologies or collaborative works may list contributor pages separately for easier navigation.
• Summary and Detail TOCs: In corporate reports, an executive summary TOC can be paired with a technical appendix TOC.
• Appendix or Reference TOCs: These are useful in instructional manuals or scientific publications for pointing to supplementary material.
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• Overall and Chapter-Level TOCs: Use a simplified main TOC with detailed TOCs at the start of each chapter or section.
• Sorted Navigation TOCs: Offering readers multiple ways to browse content—by topic, title, or date—is ideal for catalogs and directories.

Below, we’ll work through two of these use cases together.

Crafting Your Multi-TOC Strategy

Although using multiple TOCs does require a specific strategy, you should start with a general routine that you should always use in longer documents: Create and properly use paragraph styles, which are essential for all of the table of contents features: initial generation, updating, and keeping track of page number changes. 

For example, if your document has three levels of headings, make sure each has its own paragraph style (named, for example, H1, H2, and H3). If you want to create a tables index, make sure your table titles and captions have their own paragraph styles. Going for a table of figures? Your figures need some associated text, generally figure numbers, titles, or captions, with their own paragraph styles. Assign a paragraph style to anything you want InDesign to reference in a TOC, and make sure only the text you want in the TOC(s) is formatted with that specific style.

Tip: Name your styles logically. Figure captions should all use a style like Figure Caption; contributor names might use something like Contributor Heading, and so on. (For a refresher on paragraph style basics, see Erica Gamet’s excellent video.)

Once you’ve got your paragraph styles worked out and assigned to relevant text, your next step is to decide in which TOC(s) each paragraph style’s content will appear. Figure 1, for example, shows how I might organize paragraph styles into a main TOC, a table of figures, and a tables index. My top row is the name of the tables I want; the second row shows the paragraph style names I plan to include in those tables. Note how I’ve used indents to simulate how I want to nest the TOC entries.

Generating a Table of Contents

Before we dive into creating multiple tables of contents, let me walk you through the basics of generating a single TOC.

1. In your InDesign document, go to where you’d like your table of contents to reside. Create a page if needed; you don’t need to select anything or use any specific tool at this point.
2. Choose Layout > Table Of Contents to open the Table Of Contents dialog box (Figure 2).
3. In the Title field, give your TOC a title, such as Contents, Table of Contents, or Inside.
4. Notice the Styles In Table Of Contents section has two columns: Include Paragraph Styles, which lists the styles in your document whose text will appear in the TOC, and Other Styles, which lists all the paragraph styles used in your document. Select a style from Other Styles (right), and click the Add button to move that style to the Include Paragraph Styles column (left). Go ahead and add your TOC’s relevant styles to the Include Paragraph Styles column now. You can see how I added styles for three heading levels. If you change your mind about a style or mis-click, simply select it in the left column and click Remove to return it to the right column.
5. For each style listed in the Include Paragraph Styles column, you can assign an entry style, which is the paragraph style that, in turn, you’ll use to format that level of text in the TOC itself. For instance, if you want your H1 entries aligned flush left, but H2 and H3 progressively indented, you’d create three paragraph styles—perhaps named TOC Level 1, TOC Level 2, and TOC Level 3. Then, one by one, select each style in the Include list and choose the matching style from the Entry Style menu.
6. When you’re finished including and styling your TOC entries, click OK.
7. You will now have a loaded cursor with the TOC story on it. As you would any other text on a loaded cursor, place it into an existing text frame or into a new one you create by dragging with the loaded cursor.

You now have a table of contents! If you need to update it but don’t need to change any options, choose Layout > Update Table Of Contents. If you want to change options, such as which styles to include or their entry styles, go to Layout > Table Of Contents again. You can then change anything you need to about the TOC. Make sure the Replace Existing Table Of Contents option is turned on and, when you click the OK button, InDesign will replace your previous TOC with one reflective of your new options.

Creating TOCs for Different Content

The secret to multiple tables of contents is table of contents styles. Given the styles in the name, you might expect that these are a way to format the look of TOCs, just as paragraph styles, character styles, object styles, table styles, and cell styles all control the look of their respective types of contents.

That’s true, but there’s more to the story. Although table of contents styles do affect appearance attributes, they also—maybe primarily—determine the content of a TOC. In other words, a table of contents style not only determines how your TOC looks, it also copies content from your document based on which styles you originally applied to that content. 

1. Choose Layout > Table Of Contents, and build your first table of contents per the previous instructions. Don’t click OK just yet; instead, click the Save Style button.
2. When the Save Style dialog box appears, give your style a name and click OK.
3. You’ll see your newly saved style at the top of the Table Of Contents dialog box in the TOC Style field. Click OK, and then place your first TOC onto the desired page.
4. Return to Layout > Table Of Contents to define your second TOC.
5. Repeat the same steps you used to create the first TOC, and then click Save Style to create a second TOC style.
6. After saving your style, click OK in the Table Of Contents dialog box, and then place your new, second TOC showing different content.
7. Repeat this process for a third, fourth, or additional TOCs as needed.

Each TOC will be as unique as you need it to be and fully functional. When you export your document to an interactive format, such as PDF, EPUB, or HTML, all the TOC entries—in every TOC—will include live hyperlinks to the content they reference.

In Figure 3 you can see, sans formatting and context, parts of my two TOCs for a business report I laid out last year using exactly this technique.

Creating Multiple TOCs from the Same Content

In addition to using table of contents styles to create tables of different types of content, you can also use them to build different ways of presenting the same content. 

For example, I created a training catalog for ThinkB!G.LearnSmart, which offers dozens of courses in various categories and learning tracks, including some with certification preparation and testing (like the Adobe Certified Expert exam and the Microsoft Office Specialist exam). With so many classes, a single listing—alphabetical or categorical—might be difficult for students and their organizational superiors to navigate. Would a student interested in learning Firefly in Photoshop know to look in an alphabetical list under P for “Photoshop with AI BootCamp” or under A for “Adobe Creative Cloud Generative AI for Advanced Graphic Designers, Government & Teams,” which includes Photoshop’s AI features and more? Would someone who needs their team to learn how to make InDesign documents accessible and Section 508–compliant search for that training under the 508 Accessibility category or the Print + Digital Design category?

People don’t all think the same way, and people are busy. Quickly finding the information you’re after and moving on to something else is important for saving time. Creating mechanisms that allow rapid access is essential, so I built four different tables of contents for the course catalog: 

• A primary, standard TOC with one entry each for the categories in the course catalog 
• A courses-by-category TOC that presents each course inside its categories, which is how they’re presented on the following pages, so the TOC is effectively linear—page 1, then 2, then 3, and so on (Figure 4) 
• An alphabetical TOC that presents the courses alphabetically, regardless of their categories, making it easy for a would-be student to find, say, all the classes related to InDesign grouped together (Figure 5) 
• A certification TOC that lists only the courses related to certification preparation and testing, which allows people interested in becoming certified in Adobe or Microsoft applications, or DaVinci Resolve to easily find those course listings without having to flip through every page, and scour through every class in the catalog (Figure 6).

All four TOCs were hyperlinked to the individual course listings in the PDFs exported from InDesign. (Thanks to ThinkB!G.Learn.Smart for kindly letting me share my work on their catalog for this article.)

How would you create similar TOCs that list the same information in different ways? The same as you would create TOCs for listing different content: table of contents styles.

The settings I used for three of the four TOC styles are pretty similar; I just included the relevant paragraph styles and set their entry styles to look right. When you include a paragraph style in TOC generation, the TOC will list the included text in logical order. For example, in a book about the history of Siouxsie and the Banshees and their albums, the TOC would likely list LPs ordered by release date, by default Tinderbox (1986) would come before Peepshow (1988) and Superstition (1991). That’s the way InDesign will list them in the TOC, in the same order as the content appears throughout the document. Some readers, however, might look for album titles alphabetically, wanting to read about the inspiration for the song “Kiss Them for Me,” which they know was the lead single from Superstition. For that, you’d need an alphabetic listing of albums, just as you’d need for the training company’s listing of courses, or for a list of contributors or photographers in a book project. InDesign can do that, too. Here’s how:

1. Start your alphabetic table of contents just like you would any other, but don’t yet save your TOC style.
2. In the Table Of Contents dialog box, click the More Options button on the right.
3. Among the additional options you’ll see, turn on the Sort Entries In Alphabetical Order option (Figure 7). 
4. Save the style, and place the TOC. All the entries, regardless of their actual location in the document, will be sorted alphanumerically.

That is how you add multiple tables of contents to any document. You can create as many as you need, sorted logically or alphanumerically, styled however you like. You can even change the components of each entry, as well as the appearance of those components, via the controls available from More Options. More importantly, all of your TOCs are live, meaning you can update them to reflect movement of text to different pages. You just have to be careful to select the correct TOC Style before updating it.

Also, note that, although every TOC will be hyperlinked, only a single TOC can be used to create bookmarks in the PDF. Turn on the Create PDF Bookmarks option in Table Of Contents dialog box only for a single TOC; otherwise, when you export to PDF, the table you updated most recently will be the one whose entries become PDF bookmarks.

Is More Better?

Next time you create a long document in InDesign ask yourself: Would the reader benefit from having multiple ways to navigate the document? If the answer is “yes,” create multiple TOCs.