Table of contents centred (Bringhurst style)

[Phjamr]

Does anyone know a way of achieving a centred table of contents, as in the example here? (See “Example 2 – Centred table of contents”, halfway down the page. The design is inspired by Robert Bringhurst’s book on typography.)

It seems you would need a right-aligned tab stop in the middle of the page for the chapter heading, then a left-aligned tab stop for the page numbers. At the moment I can’t see a way to do this, as ticking the “right-aligned” box for a tab in the TOC dialogue sends it all the way to the right, and there is no option to enter a position value.

Any suggestions for a workaround would be welcome! Many thanks in advance.

[oweng]

It is currently not possible to use the built-in index/tables facility to produce the indicated type of layout:

I would not refer to this as a “centred” table of content (ToC), but rather a tab-aligned ToC. Enhancement bug fdo#32360 is a request to allow full support of all the usual types of tab stops, which is required to produce this type of layout, using the built-in facility.

It is however possible to manually create this layout using standard paragraph text combined with either the required tab settings or a table (as indicated in the linked example). Cross-references to the required headings (one for the heading text and one for the page number) can be used to obtain the required result.

[Phjamr]

Hi Oweng - thank you for the reply. That’s very helpful to have the relevant bug report and workaround strategy. Much appreciated.