Creating an Advertiser Index (or other difficult TOC)

One of the things I like most about InDesign’s table of contents feature is that it’s document-wide rather than simply story-wide. That means that any text in any text frame can be included in a table of contents — even text in a nonprinting text frame. With this in mind, you can add “tags” to items on your page that don’t appear in print, but do appear in your table of contents.

One of the best examples of this is an advertiser index. You can place a text frame with an advertiser’s name on top of that company’s ad in your document. Set the text frame’s color to None, make sure Text Wrap is off, and turn on Nonprinting Object in the Attributes palette (or put the frame on a hidden layer), and it’s almost as though this were a “non-object” — the text won’t print, and it won’t affect the ad underneath. But if that advertiser’s name is tagged with a paragraph style, you can include it in the list of advertisers, using the Table of Contents feature (Layout > Table of Contents). You probably want to group it with the ad itself so that if someone moves the ad to a different page, your tag-frame moves, too.

The same trick applies to building a list of pictures in a catalog, or for any other instance where what you want on the list doesn’t actually appear on the page (or doesn’t appear in a way that you can capture in a TOC).

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