Hello,

This is a pretty specific post. It’s about how to do a tricky table of contents with dots in LaTeX — mostly for people who need such a format in University/College. I did not write this code and neither did my source. Regardless, I’ll credit my friend for giving it to me — thanks goes to Chris Schwarz (cschwarz at ucdavis dot edu). We’re not sure who wrote it originally. Sorry. Anyway, the results look like this:

Naturally, the only difference between this and a regular table of contents is the dots. Here is the code to make this work:

% This is all for formatting and making the Table of Contents according to 
% spec. Don't play with it.
\makeatletter
\renewcommand\l@section[2]{%
  \ifnum \c@tocdepth >\z@
    \addpenalty\@secpenalty
    \addvspace{1.0em \@plus\p@}%
    \setlength\@tempdima{1.5em}%
    \begingroup
      \parindent \z@ \rightskip \@pnumwidth
      \parfillskip -\@pnumwidth
      \leavevmode \bfseries
      \advance\leftskip\@tempdima
      \hskip -\leftskip
      #1\nobreak\ 
      \leaders\hbox{$\m@th\mkern \@dotsep mu\hbox{.}\mkern \@dotsep mu$}
     \hfil \nobreak\hb@xt@\@pnumwidth{\hss #2}\par
    \endgroup
  \fi}
\makeatother

And, I suppose, a brief explanation of how to use this is in order. Put the above code into your preamble section — that is, before the document proper starts. What this code does, in short, is reprogram the \tableofcontents command to display the dots instead of plain space. Therefore, after you start your document, simply use \tableofcontents as you normally would. \tableofcontents will generate what is shown in the image. It does so based on your sectioning — that is, chapters, sections, and other such things. It will place this wherever you use the command, so I suggest using it at the beginning of your document, after the title page. As another tip, use \newpage to force a new page to start. If you surround your \tableofcontents command with a pair of \newpage(s), that will make it have it’s own page for sure. Also note, sometimes, you may have to run the LaTeX code a couple times to get the table of contents to point to the correct pages. If this fails, consider editing the .toc file that is generated. Regardless, it gets it right most of the time.

I’ve also briefly written up an example of the table of contents in action:

• Source — This also has some of my customized code for doing margins and special math symbols.
• PDF Output

Enjoy. I hope this will be useful to someone.

I’ve been working hard towards putting some of the planning we’ve been doing “down on paper.” As such, I’ve started populating the Wiki pages that Google gave us with information and images. I’m not going to spend a lot of time rewriting what I have already put there, but here is a summary of what i have done:

1) Put together some objects to use in the diagrams:

2) I’ve then used this combined with a partially tiled globe/island to generate some tutorials:

And

This kind of thing actually takes a long time. However, now that I am mostly set up, I hope that it should take less and less time to add more ideas on to it. Hoping for the best

(Oh, and of course, to see the full tutorials/explanations of our planning, go to our project page: http://code.google.com/p/plutocracy/wiki/Information )