How to add/change dot leaders with an apa6 document class

Question

I've been having tremendous difficulty trying to add dot leaders for section titles (or maybe they're chapter titles?) on my thesis, because I'm using the apa6 document class.

I can't seem to get any of the commands with the Tocloft package to work because I feel pretty sure the apa6 class doesn't support most of the commands that are provided. I keep getting errors when I try the renewal commands for section/chapter headings that were provided as solutions in other threads with similar questions (only they were for book or article classes I believe).

Does anybody have any idea how I could proceed? I hope I won't have to change definitions inside of the document class itself.

Answer 1

You write

I can't seem to get any of the commands with the Tocloft package to work because I feel pretty sure the apa6 class doesn't support most of the commands that are provided.

I'm afraid I'm not able to generate a conflict between the apa6 document class and the tocloft package. As the following example shows, the command \renewcommand{\cftsecleader}{\cftdotfill{\cftdotsep}} succeeds in generating leader dots between the text of the section headers and the associated page numbers in the table of contents.

\documentclass[doc]{apa6}
\usepackage{tocloft}
\renewcommand{\cftsecleader}{\cftdotfill{\cftdotsep}}
\title{Long and Elaborate Greetings}
\shorttitle{Short Greetings}
\author{XYZ}
\affiliation{Some great place}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents
\section{Hello}
\subsection{Good morning}
\subsubsection{Hi}
\end{document}