One of the most asked for feature in PowerTOC is the ability to use tab leaders in the table of contents entries. It is so common to see them in books and other “typesetted” documents that people want to use them also in the TOCs of their presentations.

The problem is that PowerPoint does not include tab leaders natively. Therefore they have to be simulated repeating the leader character between the name of the slide and the slide number. This is a no-brainer when using a non-proportional font, but is completely impossible with proportional fonts (at least, it is not possible to guarantee that the leader characters and the numbers are properly aligned).

This can be clearly seen in the examples shown below. The first one, using Courier New, looks nice because all characters have the same width. The second one, using a proportional font like Candara (my favorite font these days), looks jagged.

Slightly better results can be achieved using character spacing options, but still it is not easy to obtain true aligned numbers without using proper tab leader characters.

Today, a client has shown me a way to simulate leader characters. And the trick is really simple: underlined tabs. In fact I used this trick years ago, before the days of desktop publishing applications such as Page Maker. But I had long forgotten.

The effect is not quite as nice as using dots, but I think it is enough for the purposes of PowerTOC and therefore it will become a new feature of PowerTOC 3.