Creating An Index Of Illustrations In Pages Documents

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create an Illustration Index in your Pages documents and show you lots of other Pages tips along the way.

So let's say you've got a document like this. It's got different chapters here and I've used a different style for the chapters. Also you've got some illustrations as well. You want to have, like, little titles and captions for the illustrations throughout the document. But what you want in the end is not just a regular table of contents showing you all the chapters but also an index of illustrations showing you where each illustration is. If it's a PDF you're creating allowing you to jump right to different illustrations. You can do this rather easily by creating not one but two Table of Contents in your document. That's right! You can create more than one. 

First let's look at creating that first one just to see how a Table of Contents are created. So here's my example document. You can see I've got chapter titles here. These are on lines by themselves. So it is important that they be on line by themselves and they have a style set. In this case they're using the Heading Style. The other paragraphs, like these, are using Body Style. If I look at all of the different chapter headings here you can see that that is using Heading Style, the rest is using Body Style. This is very useful because I can actually update the style and it updates all the chapter headings, but also it's required if you want to do a Table of Contents. 

So I'm going to put the cursor there at the beginning and do Insert and then insert a Table of Contents for the document. Now when I do that it's going to generate a Table of Contents. There it's got eight chapters. The way it knew there were eight chapters is it found eight lines that were Heading Style. As a matter of fact if I go to Customize Style here on the right you see it says Table of Contents because that is what's selected. I could see that the Heading Style is the only one checked. If I had other styles here, like Heading 2, Heading 3, I could check or uncheck those and they would be included in the Table of Contents if checked. What this is basically doing is looking for all of the paragraphs with Heading Style, putting them in a list, and then putting the page numbers here to the right. That's all Table of Contents does. So it is easy to create a Table of Contents. But what about the images or illustrations, like this. 

Well, we can create a second Table of Contents that references just those. The trick is to use another Paragraph Style for those. So, I've got this image here and with this image I've set it for Arrange to In Line with Text. I like that because then this image is basically like its own line of text. As a matter of fact it is. If I go to View and then Show Invisibles you can see there's the paragraph marked there at the end of this line and there's a paragraph mark at the end of this line. This image is basically the only character on this line of text. I can Insert a blank line before and it pushes this down. It is in line with the text. So that's how I've got that. 

Now I also have two lines below this. This I'm calling the image title and this is the image caption. I could select the image here and under Style for the Image I could turn on Title and Caption. Then I get these little text boxes here for Title above and Caption below. The only problem with those is they are not part of the Body Text so they can't be used for a Table of Contents or Index of Illustrations like we're going to create. You want to have these be part of the regular text. But they are not Body Text. They are something different. So, for instance, for this one instead of having it be Body Text let's go ahead and make it different. 

I'm going to make it Bold, Italics and I'm going to center it. Then I'm going to maybe make it a tad bigger. Instead of this being Body Text I'm going to click here and click the Plus Button to create a new Paragraph Style. I'm going to name it Image Title. Then I'm going to select the next line which I'm going to Caption. I already have a Caption Style. I already have a Caption Style. I can actually use this. But what I'd rather do is create my own. This is going to be centered. This is going to be Italic, and I want some space after this. I'm going to add, after paragraph spacing, 8 pixels. I'm going to create this and call it Image Caption, like that. I can go further than that. I can select the line that the image is  on. Now I can go in and say, let's add before paragraph a little space there. Maybe a little bit after paragraph. So there's a little space afterwards before the title I know that is coming. I can call this Image, like that. So I have Image, Image Caption, and Image Title. 

I can, also if I want, select the Image and then instead of it being text here now it's everything that applies to the Image on the right side. There are Styles here like this style, like that. Or maybe I want to customize it. Instead of this here I'm going to increase the border a bit. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger, like that. Then I'm going to go to the next page of Styles, click the Plus Button, and I've created my own custom style for the image itself. This will be useful because I can apply it then to all of the images and update all the images. As a matter of fact let's do that. If we're happy with how this looks let's go to the next illustration here.

Here it is. I'm going to select the Illustration itself, the image itself, and I'm going to use that Style, like that. But I'm also going to select the paragraph that the image sits on, because it's in line with text just like all the others. When I insert each image I made it in line with text. I'm going to change the style for this to that image style. That will give us a little spacing at the top and bottom. For this paragraph here this is the Title. I'm going to call this Image Title. For this one I'm going to call this one or assign Image Caption. So it looIs just like the previous one. What's really cool is I can update these. Like if I select this and say, you know what I want the text color to be, like you know, a gray. I can update that style. Now if I go back to this here, because I updated the style, it updated what this paragraph looks like.

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Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through and I'm going to update all the illustrations to use those four styles. So the Style for the image itself and then the line the image is on, then the line for the Title, and a line for the Caption. So I've updated them all. If I had planned ahead I would have just been doing this for each image as I brought it in so it wouldn't have been so much work to update them all now. But now that they are all using a system set of styles it's easy for me to update all of them at once if I want to. But, more importantly, it's now very easy for me to add an index to these illustrations because the title for each one of these is using this Image Title Style. 

So, I'm going to go all the way back here to the beginning and I've got this Table of Contents. Let's go ahead and insert a line before hand and call this a Table of Contents and I can change the style here to say Title. Notice that when it was Heading Style it actually added itself to the Table of Contents because this Table of Contents uses the Heading Style to build itself. Now I'm going to go and add a few blank lines here and then I'm going to add another title and I'm going to call this one Index of Illustrations. Below it I'm going to insert another Table of Contents. At first Pages is just going to go, oh, so you just want the same thing again. Okay fine. So now I've got this selected here. I'm going to give it new instructions. I'm going to Customize Styles and I'm not going to use Headings. Instead I'm going to use Image Title. It's going to find those five image title lines and it's going to put them here just like it's a Table of Contents. It's going to show each page. 

Now the Table of Contents auto-updates. If I add more text, all of these page numbers will change. If I move the Illustrations around, add some things before them, it's going to, you know, adjust the pages as needed. If I add new illustrations, as long as I use Image Title for the illustration, it will add it here to the Index of Illustrations. So I've got something really useful here. I can have this right here on the same page as the Table of Contents. I can, you know, select right before it and say Insert Page Break and now it's on its own page. But there is also nothing to prevent me from moving this whole thing to the end of the document if I want. I can select all this, in fact, and I'm going to use a Command X to cut. Then I'm going to go to the end of the document and I'm going to Command V to paste. You can see I can put the Index of Illustrations here at the end of the document if I want. So somebody can reference those. 

Now whichever way you do it the great thing is, is that if you now were to export this as a PDF or an EPUB, it's interactive. So I'll export this as a PDF here. When I go to view this PDF, say in Preview or any PDF viewing app, I can say Click on a chapter right here. It will jump to that chapter. But I could also click on one of the illustrations in this Index of Illustrations. It works the same way as this Table of Contents. They are exactly the same thing. It will jump right to that illustration. Specifically right to this line here. 

There is plenty of variations on this. You don't have to have this after the illustration. I can easily move it to before, right here. It will work the same way. I can use this line or an additional style as well for other things. Like, for instance, Tables and Charts that I include in the document. So I hope you learned a lot about using the Table of Contents for more than just the Table of Contents and also using Paragraph Styles in Pages. Thanks for watching.