Google-docs – Why does Google Docs make some H1 headings bold in the Table of Contents and some not bold

formattinggoogle docs

In my Google docs document I have added a Table of Contents. It's the kind with page numbers. In the Table of Contents, some of the Heading 1 (top-level) headings are bold, and some are not bold. Why?

I can't find any reason why some of them have been made bold. None of the actual headings themselves use bold text, they are only bold in the TOC.

Best Answer

So after deleting the TOC and recreating it from scratch, I can see that the correct (default) behaviour is that all H1s in the TOC should be bold.

I think what caused my confusion here is that most formatting in the TOC is lost when you 'Update' the TOC contents, however it seems that removing bold formatting from a header is not lost on update.

In my document, someone has at some point manually removed the bold formatting from H1s in the TOC, then as new H1s appeared they were bold (because this is the default). I was expecting 'Update table of contents' to lose that kind of manual formatting change, but it doesn't, so anything marked as not bold stayed not bold.