Alternative uses for the TOC feature

- Table of Contents is the most versatile of all of InDesign's long-document features. You can use it for a lot more than just TOCs. Use it any time you need to make a list of content within a document or a book. Think of things like photo credits, lists of advertisers, lists of tables and figures, et cetera. For example, here I'd like to make a photo credits page with the Table of Contents feature. And one of the key points I want to make is that I can set up a Table of Contents style to gather information even though that information won't appear anywhere else in my final output.

And there are a few ways to accomplish this. Here I'm going to use the option in the Table of Contents to include items on hidden layers, so let's set that up. I'm going to switch over to Adobe Bridge, and I'm looking at the Links folder inside the Exercise Files. And here I can see all the photos used in this document. If I click on one, over on the right, in the Metadata pane, inside IPTC Core, I can see the photo credit information if I scroll down, right here, Credit Line.

And this is what I want to gather for my photo credits page with the Table of Contents feature. So let's switch back to InDesign, and we're going to put that photo credit information on the page with the Static Caption feature. So I'll go to Object, Captions, and check my Caption Setup. I'll make sure that the Metadata field in the middle here is set to Credit, and I'll put the credits over each image by using a negative offset, and at the bottom, so I'll select Below Image. I'll set the photo credits in this paragraph style, PhotoCreditLarge, I'll put them on a PhotoCredits layer, and by having them on their own layer, I can hide that layer or make it non-printing, and keep it out of my output if I don't want those credits to appear on the pages with the photos.

So let's click OK, and let's make a few static captions with these settings. So I'll click once on this Big Cheese image, I want to have the frame selected, not the image inside it, and then I'll right-click and choose Captions, Generate Static Caption. And there's my photo credit, Getty Images, Brand X. Let's make a few more, so I'll go down to the next page, I'll select this Big Cheese image, right-click, Captions, Generate Static Caption.

And I've actually gone ahead and done that for a bunch of the images in this document, so we can build our photo credits page. So let's go to the Layers panel, and let's hide this PhotoCredits layer, so all the photo credits disappear now. And now let's use the Table of Contents feature to grab those credits and put them together on a credits page. In the Pages panel I'll go to the last spread in the document, and I want my photo credits to appear here on page 32. So I'll go to the Layout menu and choose Table of Contents.

And here's my Table of Contents style that I've created for the photo credits. I've added a title called Photos and styled it in my TOC-Title paragraph style, and I've selected the PhotoCreditLarge paragraph style to gather up those static captions and put them in my Table of Contents. Then in terms of formatting, the credits will be using this paragraph style, PhotoCredit, with a page number after the entry. And I'm going to run them all together in the same paragraph by selecting Run-In. And most importantly, I'm including text on hidden layers.

I'll click OK, yes, I want items in overset text, please. And I'll click in this text frame and create my photo credits. Let's zoom in on it, and check it out. So here's the title that I set up in the Table of Contents, and all the information from those static captions on the hidden layer, along with their page numbers. And if you're wondering, the formatting of the page numbers is coming from a GREP style that's working inside this paragraph style. I cover working with GREP styles in another movie.

So in this movie, we saw an example of how to use the Table of Contents feature to build other document pages, like this photo credits page. And how to grab information like image metadata that won't appear anywhere else in the document by putting it on a hidden layer.