Reply To: TOC without Local Formatting

There’s a quirk in how InDesign handles TOC entries. In a nutshell, the Paragraph Style in the text will be converted to the assigned TOC style, but any local override will pass straight through unchanged. That includes manually applying a Character Style to words in the heading. It doesn’t apply to drop caps or nested styles that are part of the text Paragraph Style.

This can get pretty grim. If you have a headline Paragraph Style using 30 point type on 30 points of leading, and you tweak the leading on the second line of a particular headline to 29 points for better appearance, the 14 point TOC entry for that headline will ALSO have 29 points of leading. Scares the pants off you the first time it happens.

I brought this one up years ago, but it seems that fixing it is a non-trivial problem.