Contents lists and cross-references that renumber themselves

Never type a page number into a contents list

The contents list is the first place a long document goes wrong, because it is built early, the document shifts, and nobody rechecks it. A generated contents list cannot be wrong, because it is derived from the pages themselves.

How a generated contents works

It reads paragraph styles. Every paragraph carrying “Chapter Title” becomes a level-1 entry; every “A-Head” becomes level 2; the page number is read from where the paragraph actually is.

Which means two things follow. The styles have to be applied properly: a heading formatted by hand rather than by style will be missing from the contents, and that is the commonest failure. And you have to regenerate after the pages move.

• InDesign: Layout ▸ Table of Contents. Choose which paragraph styles map to which levels, assign a paragraph style to each level’s entry, and tick Include Book Documents for a multi-file book. Update with Layout ▸ Update Table of Contents.
• Scribus: Insert a text frame, give it a name, then File ▸ Document Setup ▸ Table of Contents and Indexes, and set which attribute to collect. Generate from Extras ▸ Generate Table of Contents. Scribus’s implementation is more limited and works on an attribute you attach to frames.
• LibreOffice Writer: Insert ▸ Table of Contents and Index. Update by right-clicking it.
• LaTeX: \tableofcontents and two compilation passes.

Leader dots done properly

The row of dots between an entry and its page number is a tab leader, not typed full stops.

Set a right-aligned tab at the right edge of the column, and in the tab dialog set the Leader character to a full stop, often with a space after it so the dots are not crowded: type . as the leader string. Then the dots regenerate at the right length whenever an entry changes.

Typed dots are the giveaway of an amateur document, and they are also wrong the moment a chapter title gets longer.

Cross-references

“See figure 12 on page 47” is a reference that will be wrong within a week unless it is live.

InDesign: Type ▸ Hyperlinks & Cross-References ▸ Insert Cross-Reference. Point it at a paragraph (usually a figure caption or a heading) and choose a format: “Full Paragraph”, “Page Number Only”, or a custom build. When the figure moves, the reference updates.

The Cross-References panel flags any reference whose target has been deleted, which is a genuine safety net on a technical manual.

LaTeX: \label{fig:pump} and \ref{fig:pump} / \pageref{fig:pump}, and this is where LaTeX is unbeatable: a document with four hundred cross-references is no harder than one with four.

LibreOffice Writer: Insert ▸ Cross-reference, with reference targets set on headings, bookmarks or numbered items.

Scribus has no cross-reference system. On a document that needs them, this is a real reason to choose something else.

Numbered figures, tables and equations

Set the caption paragraph style to use an automatic numbered list. Insert a figure in the middle and everything after it renumbers, and every cross-reference follows.

InDesign: define a numbered list under Type ▸ Bulleted & Numbered Lists ▸ Define Lists, then attach it to the caption style with the format Figure ^#:. LibreOffice: Insert ▸ Caption, which does this for you and creates the reference target at the same time.

Indexing, briefly

An index is built from index markers placed in the text, not from a search. You mark a term, optionally with a subentry, and the application collects the markers and their page numbers.

It is slow, careful work (a 300-page book’s index is one to three days) and it is valuable in a reference book. InDesign and LibreOffice both support it; Scribus’s support is minimal; LaTeX has makeindex.

If the budget does not allow an index, say so rather than producing a bad one. A concordance of every occurrence of every word is worse than no index, because it wastes the reader’s time convincingly.

The rule

Anything in a document that refers to a position in the document (a page number, a figure number, a chapter name in a running head) should be generated. If you are typing it, you are creating something that will become untrue without telling anybody.