Worked like a charm…I just changed $1 to $0 and that did the trick. No idea how it worked but it did! I will now study more about these wildcard numbers and what they mean…seems like a mighty handy tool to me. Thanks a ton. :)

Thank you for the quick response, David. Just tried doing as you suggested but I must be doing something stupid because the “$1” bit is replacing the text that needs to be within the tags. For instance:

This is a nice book. (where nice is in bold)

…turns into:

This is a <i>$1</i> book.

How can I make Indesign see $1 as a wildcard variable for the text being tagged?

That’s a brilliant find, Kelly! And I’m thoroughly miffed at how something this big escaped the attention of all those publishers who use Indesign all the time and the folks at Adobe themselves. Super stranger indeed. I hope they put a fix in place with some future release. In the meantime, as you advised, I have changed every single instance of chapter number on the second layer into hard text instead of a variable. A frustratingly manual workaround if you ask me given there are over 60 such documents!

“So again, the easy fix: make your chapter numbers live text in the “Chap Num + Name” paragraph.”…just so I understand you well, “live text” here means hard-coded text as opposed to variable, right? Or is it something else that I’m not aware of? Still learning things with ID so apologies for the naïve question.

Also, for what it’s worth, I have noticed this problem begins to occur only at the 10th entry of this style (chapter num + name). If I remove some chapters to make it, say, the 9th or 6th, the problem goes away for that entry since it’s no longer the 10th. Not sure if I’m able to explain it well.

P.S. I just selected the No Page Number option in the TOC dialog to be sure and ter the page number persists next to the last two entries in my TOC! Check this out:

(https://i.stack.imgur.com/BhFp3.png)