Shortening Lines in Table of Contents

[srd]

Section headings in legal briefs tend to be long. When creating a table of
contents using the native heading styles, Word doesn't automatically break
the lines, and the entries crowd their page numbers. My workaround is to
manually break the entries, but when I update the contents, the line
breaks revert. Is there a way to get Word to automatically break the
entries or at least to avoid having them revert?

Stephen

 

[Word Heretic]

G'day srd <[email protected]>,

If you make the final para mark of the heading invisible, then the
following para will appear to run in it. Thus you could manually
'trim' the content for the toc pages.

Eg

Heading 1 This is my heading text <hidden para mark>
NotHeading 1 , it is long and boring and this bit is not in TOC.

Displays

This is my heading text


in the TOC and

This is my heading text, it is long and boring and this bit is not in
TOC.

as the heading in the document.

You could also use TOC fields to manually specify the content of your
TOC.

Steve Hudson - Word Heretic

steve from wordheretic.com (Email replies require payment)
Without prejudice


srd reckoned:

 

[Stefan Blom]

You can add a right indent to the relevant TOC styles, which will make
the table of contents look better:

Heading text heading text heading text heading text
heading text heading text heading text.......................#

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

As Stefan says, the usual way to handle this is to add a right indent to the
TOC style to wrap the text short of the page numbers (which will still be at
the right tab, which will still be at the right page margin but outside the
paragraph margin). Another approach is to add the \x switch to the TOC
field; this causes the TOC entry to preserve line breaks in the original
heading.

 

[srd]

Thanks. Sounds like the right indent is the way to go. I appreciate the
suggestion to shorten the heading as well.

Stephen Diamond

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If you want to shorten the heading that appears in the TOC, you could also
use a TC field.

 

[Chip Orange]

One other "gotya", make sure you aren't using the \w switch in your toc
field code; we were for a specific reason, but extra tabs got in our text to
be the entry, and really through off the columnar formatting.