Color for each TOC highest level entry

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erinhill
Propeller Head
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Aug 05, 2020 1:35 pm

Color for each TOC highest level entry

Post by erinhill »

I'd like each section of my manual to have a color so it's easier to find (the sides of the pages would be a color). With that, I'd like the the colors to be reflected in the TOC. So, each heading 1 would have a color next to it or as the background to the text (whatever way works) in the TOC. Anyone know how to do this? I'm working with a PDF/Word output.
robdocsmith
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Location: Queensland, Australia

Re: Color for each TOC highest level entry

Post by robdocsmith »

Hi,

I do this for my PDFs (I don't output to Word so don't know if the approach would work there). I have a sectioned manual where each section is identified with a coloured header and footer, with a particular icon in the header for each section. And I'm about to produce a quick reference guide that has a coloured tab on the outside edge of the booklet for each section.

The only way I could think to do achieve this was to have many different page layouts for each section. Each section therefore has a title page with a minitoc page layout, and pages in each section have a specific page layout to continue the appropriate coloured header and footer. Each new chapter starts with a section break in the TOC and page layouts are applied to chapter topics as appropriate. Each page layout features decoration frames for the coloured elements and icons, and body frames to hold text and headings where needed.

I'd be happy to learn of other ways of achieving the same results!

I'll warn you though, there are disadvantages to having multiple page layouts if you want to produce for different output formats, not least the management of multiple layouts and maintaining consistency among them. I wanted to reformat my documents for various portrait and landscape applications and am faced with having to duplicate the TOC and reapply a new set of page layouts. If this is going to be in your work flow, it's better to be able to specify a single page layout in the target. But I couldn't think of a way to do the coloured headers and tabs with a single layout.

Cheers,
Rob
erinhill
Propeller Head
Posts: 23
Joined: Wed Aug 05, 2020 1:35 pm

Re: Color for each TOC highest level entry

Post by erinhill »

Thank you! I will try this!
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