Increasing spacing between section number and title in the table of contents

Question

I'm using the simple ordinary \tableofcontents command to produce a table of contents, and I find that the resulting spacing between the section number and the section title is too small:

Can someone tell me how to fix this, please. My documentclass is memoir, if that matters.

Answer 1

The width for the section numbers in the ToC is defined by the length called \cftKnumwidth, where K should be replaced by the sectioning level, i.e. chapter, section, etc. You can change it with \setlength, e.g.

\setlength\cftsectionnumwidth{4em}

See section 9.2.2 Typesetting the entries of the memoir manual for more on this.

A complete example:

\documentclass{memoir}
% \setlength\cftsectionnumwidth{4em} % uncomment to see difference
\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\chapter{A chapter}
\setcounter{section}{999} % just for this example
\section{A section}
\end{document}

Answer 2

If you have huge numbers in the ToC, you can use the \cftsetindents command (texdoc memoir, page 153) in the preamble, to control the space before and after the numbers, with this syntax:

\cftsetindents{kind}{indent}{numwidth}

Where kind in the sectioning level (e.g., subsection) indent is the length of the indent (space before the numbers) and numwidth is the space for the numbers and the separation of section titles.

For example:

\cftsetindents{section}{1em}{3em}