How to improve table of contents?

Question

I want to improve my table of contents so that I have larger writing (but with different sizes for section, subsection etc..), better spacing between lines and to add 'page' above the numbers.., maybe also removing the dots.

I have tried playing with the tocloft package and I managed to add 'page' below the 1st number but not above...

Can someone help me?

Here is my code and preamble.

\documentclass[12pt]{report}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{geometry}
\usepackage{fixltx2e}
\usepackage{grffile}
\usepackage[font=small,labelfont=bf]{caption}
\usepackage{floatrow}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage{tocbibind}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\usepackage{epstopdf}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{multirow}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\usepackage{tabu}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
%\usepackage[justification=centering]{caption}
\usepackage[titles]{tocloft}
\usepackage{caption}
\usepackage{tocloft}

\newcolumntype{L}{>{\RaggedRight\arraybackslash}X}

\titleformat{\section}
  {\normalfont\fontsize{14}{12}\bfseries}{\thesection}{1em}{}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand{\paragraph}{%
  \@startsection{paragraph}{4}%
  {\z@}{1.2ex \@plus 1ex \@minus .2ex}{-1em}%
  {\normalfont\normalsize\bfseries}%
}
\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1.0}
\makeatother
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{3}
\begin{document}
\sloppy

{\newgeometry{left=0.98in,right=0.98in,top=0.98in,bottom=0.78in}
%\addtocontents{toc}{~\hfill\textbf{Page}\par}
\setcounter{tocdepth}{3}
\tableofcontents\thispagestyle{empty}\setlength{\cftbeforechapskip}{2ex}\setlength{\cftbeforesecskip}{0.5ex}
\newpage
\setcounter{page}{1}
\renewcommand{\thesection}{\arabic{section}}

Answer 1

What you want to achieve can be done using tocloft and the families of commands \cftXfont (for the font attributes of the title and numbering of the entries), and \cftXpagefont (for the font attributes of the page numbers of the entries).

The code below shows an example in which I used \Large and bold-face for chapter entries, \Large for section entries, \large for subsection entries, and \normalsize (the default) for subsubsection entries.

I also used the family \cftbeforeXskip of lenghts to add some spacing before the chapter, section and subsection entries. If you want to modify also the spacing between lines in a group of entries (this is not clear from the description given in the question), then consider using the features provided by the setspace package.

Please, feel free to modify the settings in my example to suit your needs.

The code:

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage[titles]{tocloft}

% change the font for chapter, section and subsection titles and numbers
\renewcommand\cftchapfont{\Large\bfseries}
\renewcommand\cftsecfont{\Large}
\renewcommand\cftsubsecfont{\large}

% change the font for chapter, section and subsection page numbers
\renewcommand\cftchappagefont{\Large\bfseries}
\renewcommand\cftsecpagefont{\Large}
\renewcommand\cftsubsecpagefont{\large}

% change the spacing before chapter, section and subsection entries
\setlength\cftbeforechapskip{2ex}
\setlength\cftbeforesecskip{1ex}
\setlength\cftbeforesubsecskip{0.8ex}

\setcounter{tocdepth}{3}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{3}

\renewcommand{\thesection}{\arabic{section}}

\begin{document}

\tableofcontents

\chapter{A test chapter}
\section{A test section}
\subsection{A test subsection}
\subsubsection{A test subsubsection}

\chapter{A test chapter}
\section{A test section}
\subsection{A test subsection}
\subsubsection{A test subsubsection}

\end{document}

The result:

From the code in the original post, I suppressed all packages and settings that were not relevant to the problem discussed here.

As a final remark, please reconsider this decision; the different levels of indentation used in the ToC are more than enough to distinguish between different sectional units, a change in the font size might be superfluous. In any case, this is just a suggestion; your document's layout is, of course, up to you.