Adobe InDesign: How to Make Accessible Dot Leaders for a Table of Contents

This tutorial is a little more advanced than my usual tutorials. This tutorial assumes you have basic knowledge of InDesign’s table of contents functionality, paragraph styles, and character styles. We will also be covering GREP, but you do not need to know how to use GREP to follow this tutorial.

Dot leaders are a great way to aid the reader visually. The easily allow the eye to identify what page number corresponds with which entry in the table of contents. However, dot leaders often use a period ‘.’ to create this effect. For someone who may be using a reader, the programs will read out the dots, which can ruin the experience.

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to create a table of contents using a dotted stroke to create the dot leaders.

First, I am going to create my table of contents style. I only have one paragraph style for the purposes of this tutorial.

Set it up however you want, and then go down to ‘GREP Style’. Here, we’re going to set up our dot leaders. Click on ‘New GREP Style’.

Click the ‘@’ symbol and go to ‘Other’ and find ‘right indent tab’, or if you’re using a different character find that one.

Then in ‘Apply Style: [None]’ we’re going to make a new character style.

Make sure ‘Underline’ is checked on, and then style it however you want.

Because my text is black, that’s the colour I am going to use. I am going to make it 1pt in size, and I have set the baseline to 0, but you can play around with these if you want.

Now, I am going to set up my table of contents.

Set it up like normal, except for a couple of things:

• Do not apply your character style to the character between the entry and the page number. Because we’ve set up our character style and applied it to our tab character using GREP, we don’t need to apply any character styles here.
• In the ‘Between Entry and Number’ section, use ^>^y^>, or something similar. ^> means ‘en space’ and ^y means ‘right indent tab’. You can use whatever kind of space you want here, but this will allow there to be a little breathing room before and after your dot leader. This is totally optional, though.

So, this is what mine looks like:

And there you are! Now your users won’t be read “dot dot dot dot dot dot dot” out loud when they’re just trying to browse the table of contents.