from time to time I find myself creating textbooks and scientitic literature with quite a few hundred or even more than 1000 pages. Typically the TOC gets rather lengthy, and usually I have to correct its look manually – formating line breaks, assigning different styles etc.

When the book get its good to print, I redo the TOC (often more than once) in order to keep it up to date, so I find myself reformatting the changes again (and again), which can sum up to quite some hours of extra work. I really miss a plug-in or script solution that gives me the possibility to change every page number of a TOC entry to a cross reference, so – as long as there’s no change to the headlines in general – the page numbers are updated automatically without destroying the manual changes to the layout. 

Would something be possible to build? Or does it already exist? 

Best

Uli