Spacing around table of contents

I’m looking for a way to add some space between a table of contents and the following text. Of course I could manually insert some new lines, but I’d like something more adequate. As far as I know, there’re no table of contents specific style I could add spacing to, nor there’s any option for adding spacing inside TOC settings dialog (compared to regular Tables that do have this option in Table->Settings).

What would be the proper way of controlling space between a TOC and the rest of the text?

Thanks in advance

It is easier to answer the complementary question about spacing before TOC because a TOC always has a heading formatted with paragraph style Contents Heading. You just modify spacing for this style.

A TOC may end with any style Contents n with n = 1 to 10. You can’t do the spacing trick on these styles otherwise you mess up your whole TOC.

I wonder about the relevance of your question, document structure-wise. A TOC is usually isolated from other parts of the documents. In a common structure, you have a cover, maybe a dedication, the TOC, the chapters and optionally an index. All these parts are separated from each other by a page break.

For instance, you may add a page break in the Text Flow tab of paragraph style Heading 1 to automatically start your chapter on a new page. This effectively creates a huge “spacing” between the TOC and the first chapter. So, I don’t see your purpose in having some text after the TOC, unless it is some addition or comment for the TOC itself.

In this case, you can change the settings in Indents & spacing tab of the first paragraph after the TOC. This is direct formatting and is therefore not recommended. A better solution (for the same effect) is to define a custom paragraph style (name it First after TOC or similar) with adequate spacing specification and make it automatically followed by the paragraph style used for the rest of this part of the document (or Text Body which is the default style for the discourse).

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In my opinion it is a better solution to insert a manual page break after the table of contents.
See example: