I have wrestled with this question for years. Early on some supposedly professional writers posted that a TOC shouldn’t have leaders. I believe they only wrote novels though. I put supposedly in italics because I have never seen or heard of anything they wrote. If you are a staff writer fixing things, that isn’t really being a writer. It’s a paycheck and you are typing but, you aren’t really creating something of your own.
I’ve certainly seen leaders in many technical books and used them in my own. For those who don’t know what leaders are:
It’s those dots running across the page to the page number. In technical books I find them invaluable. (Don’t concern yourself with the grey background. That’s how Libre Office displays protected text.) You see programming geeks grew up with greenbar.
There were 66 lines to a printed page and every 3 lines got a different background color. This was how you kept things straight and followed long lines to the far side. For technical books I still like them and so do others I know.
I did bring a couple of books with me so I went digging. Jeff’s book, which I’m finally getting around to reading, doesn’t even have a TOC. (I’m 280 pages in and getting into it.) As Christmas gifts my mom got me a pair of paperbacks. One John Grisham and one James Patterson. They don’t have TOCs either.
Next I went to Scribd to look at a few previews. High on Arrival opens talking about the index in her father’s book but doesn’t have a TOC. Eventually I’ll get around to reading this book. I didn’t see if there was an index at the end because this search is just for the TOC.
Peter Druker’s The Practice of management has chapter number and title, but no page numbers. Pretty much the same with Agile Project Managment for Dummies. Admittedly I’m looking online and that might have something to do with it. They looked the same on Google Books too.
My gut tells me this is fallout. Publishers have butchered the TOC so they can streamline creating electronic content. I bet they are even dropping index creation for printed technical books.
Ah yes, the index. Now there is something which really sucks. Reading through your work yet again, tagging every term and praying the index generation feature doesn’t mangle it. Still, this is way better than having to go through a printed copy, circling every word then writing it down along with page number on an index card then sorting all the cards and manually typing an index. Electronic books don’t have them because they have search features. Not the same, but people live with it.
The Minimum You Need to Know About the Phallus of AGILE is now available.
The Minimum You Need to Know About the Phallus of AGILE
