Frequently Asked Question List for TeX
Formatting
The format of the Table of Contents, etc.
The formats of entries in the table of contents (TOC) are
controlled by a number of internal commands (discussed in section 2.3
of The LaTeX Companion. The commands
\@pnumwidth, \@tocrmarg and \@dotsep control the space
for page numbers, the indentation of the right-hand margin, and the
separation of the dots in the dotted leaders, respectively. The
series of commands named \l@_xxx_, where _xxx_ is the name of
a sectional heading (such as chapter or section…),
controls the layout of the corresponding heading, including the space
for section numbers. All these internal commands may be individually
redefined to give the effect that you want.
All that work may be avoided, using the package tocloft
which provides a set of user-level commands that may be used to change
the TOC formatting. Since exactly the same mechanisms are used
for the List of Figures and List of Tables, the layout of these sections
may be controlled in the same way.
The etoc package offers similar flexibility,
together with multicolumn tables of contents and boxes around tables
(and the like).
The KOMA-Script classes provides
an optional variant structure for the table of contents, and calculates
the space needed for the numbers automatically.
The memoir class includes the functionality
of tocloft.