The Trail of Dots in a Table of Contents
December 28th, 2009
For years, I’ve tried to figure out how to get the “proper” trail of dots into a Table of Contents (TOC). The problem? I didn’t know how to google it properly. Apparently, you need to use the phrase “leader dots” in your query (because that is officially what they are called).
It turns out to be pretty easy to do, once you understand that a typical TOC with leader dots is set up with two TABS.
The first tab sets the END of the leader dots. We use a right-justified setting for the tab to do this, and click on the “Leader dots” option.
The second tab sets the BEGINNING of the page numbers, so it is left-justified and placed just to the right of the first tab. For example, if you set the first tab for 5.375″, you might set the second tab for 5.5″.
Of course, it’s easier to just generate a TOC automatically from the Document Map, but that isn’t always an option (i.e. APA or MLA documents are tricky). Here’s my quick 2-minute tutorial for setting the tabs for leader dots in Word 2007.
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Posted in Computers 101
LOL! I had this same exact problem when typing up my dissertation. Wish this post would’ve existed back then. The other thing I had to figure out was how to number the preliminary pages with roman numerals and the actual text with regular numbers (omitting i and 1 from each). Seemed like I spent alot of time on both those issues.
None of this is an issue with LaTeX
@Mitch If you think I’m going to write 200+ pages of 99% text in a code-based format that my advisor won’t be able to track changes on and lacks a document map, you’re NUTS. Sorry … to me, using LaTex would be like using DOS again. In 137 pages, there is not a single equation, why on earth?