259 Include summaries in your table of contents

- [Voiceover] When you're working with InDesign's built in table of contents feature, like we have a table of contents in this PDF magazine here. You rely on its core function to pick up the text that's used in specific paragraph styles and insert that in its table of contents, in the TOC. But what if you want to add more text to the table of contents? Text that's not on the document pages? Like, a summary of each article or maybe an author bio from the bylines and so on. You could add it manually since, you know, this is a perfectly editable table of contents.

Let me switch to normal view quickly, so we can see a little bit better what we're working on. But the problem is that when you update the TOC, you lose your manual edits. In this video I'm going to show you a way to keep extra text that you want to include in a TOC. Text that's not shown on the document pages but that InDesign will include automatically. First, let's review what happens with a regular table of contents that we edit manually. And let's take a look at the table of contents setup here under layout menu > table of contents.

Our TOC is designed to pull in article titles and index titles. And if we look back here, on our document pages, here is an article title and look in paragraph styles, article title one. And the different articles have different styles because they're different colors, that's article title two. So you can see how that works, InDesign is pulling the content from these styled paragraphs and including it in a table of contents. But say that I wanted to say something extra about mastering the art of the boil.

We're going to use a different style here, it's called TOC description. How long to watch a pot of boiling water. Something like that. That's kind of funny, right, and interesting? But if we change something in the actual table of contents like that, let's say we go to a completely different title. We see that down here we say Top Nine caramel recipes, because we decided to remove one. And then come back to the TOC, select it and choose update from the layout menu, update table of contents.

It changed to Top Nine caramel recipes but it lost our manual edits. That's not what we want. The answer is to include the text in the document in the layout itself that you want the table of contents to pick up, but hide it from the document pages. There's a number of ways to do that. One way is to write the text off in the paste board, like here. So this is the summary that we want for this article. But just make sure that a piece of this frame touches the page.

And you don't want anything to touch the page that actually has text on it. And it's OK, by the way, if it's overset. Now let's try this and we'll make this go up a little bit like that, alright. Another way, I have another example, is to take a frame and you can put it right on the document. Maybe your users are just, you know, sticking stuff willy nilly, here, like this. But you hide it by turning on the attribute from the window menu, go down to output > attributes and turn it to non-printing.

This can be saved in an object style too, so you can have an object style for your frames that are simply comments on the article. Now you want to make sure to use, as usual for a table of contents, a unique paragraph style. So this is TOC Description, let me option click it to make sure that it's, there we go. A unique paragraph style. And of course you want to make sure to include it in your table of contents setup. So this style that we're using is called TOC description. And if I go to the layout menu, go down to table of contents > styles, we're going to edit this style and we want to include TOC description.

So I'm going to scroll through the list of paragraph styles, here, and add it. It doesn't really matter in what order it appears, but the main thing is to turn on more options and for this guy we do not want any number after it. We just want the summary, so I'll say no page number. That's good. And the style that we're going to use on the table of contents is the same style that we're using in the document, which happens to be TOC description, that's fine. Click OK and OK here. And then we'll come back up to the TOC and update it.

Layout > update table of contents. Yay, we got those two in. See, so either you have a little bit of it touching the document but you can't see the type when you print or output to PDF. Or you set it to non-printing, as we did with the attributes panel. And the third way, let's go down to taffy tips. There we go. Is to put the description, again you can stick it right here on the document, but put it on to a non-printing layer.

So this is probably not the best example, because we're pretty crowded on this page. But assuming that you had some space in the margins you would put your description completely there but put it on a layer that you've set to be non-printing. And I've already prepped this to do so. So this text frame, which is right here, I'm going to drag to the non-printing layer. And you create a non-printing layer simply by turning off the print layer option, which is on by default. You can always double check your work by pressing the W key and going to print preview and making sure that your comments are not appearing anywhere on the document pages.

Alright. That all looks good. And now let's go ahead and select our TOC and update it one more time. There you go, that is a way to include extra text in your table of contents. And so, there are lots of other ways to use this feature to your advantage, but this one of including summaries in my TOCs, is one of my favorites.