Add a title to chapters only in a table of contents

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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Hi there,

I would like to add titles to my chapters in the table of contents of a pdf document without them appearing in the main text in order to facilitate access to certain passages during a proofreading. Or any other solution to achieve this, of course. Is it possible ?

Thanks for your help

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Rather than trying to go about it in that direction, which the software isn’t terribly good at doing (there is some support for headings in the editor, but it is definitely not within the main design to do so), you might find that the View ▸ Text Editing ▸ Show Titles in Scrivenings menu toggle essentially accomplishes what you want, while allowing you to keep the heading in the binder and out of the text. The only time you won’t see them in the text is when viewing an individual item, of course, since this is a Scrivenings setting—but that shouldn’t generally be a problem since the binder title is still of course printed at the top of the editor and can be edited there.

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Thank you for this tip.

I forgot to specify that I wanted to talk about the interactive table of contents of the pdf file and not about the table of contents included in the document itself.

Chapter names can be changed in an Adobe Acrobat Pro type tool. It is a bit long considering the number of chapters in my text but not insurmountable.

Thank you for your quick response.

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Got it, thanks for the clarification.

The internal PDF ToC, such as that shown in the sidebar in most PDF readers, is driven primarily by the Section Layout’s titling policy in the following ways:

  • If we have chapters assigned to a Layout that merely prints “Chapter 12”, then that is what we will see in the PDF ToC.
  • If the binder title is included in the layout’s heading, say “1.23.8 The Topic Being discussed”, then it will drop the prefix/suffix numbering stuff and just print “The Topic Being Discussed”. Not sure why it does that, since numbers are so important to a ToC, but that’s how it is programmed to work.
  • If the layout or conditions cause no heading to be generated, it will be omitted from the ToC. This includes cases where the Layout would generate a heading, but the binder item using it has no title (grey italic text in the binder), and the Section Layout option to Include placeholder titles for untitled items is disabled (which it is by default). From what I understand this isn’t a setup you’d want anyway, since you mention not wanting them to appear in the text editor, but I list it here for the sake of completion.

Thus the most important factor is what layouts you select, and your naming choices in the binder. If you aren’t sure how layouts work, I’d suggest doing a quick run through the “Get It Out There” section of the interactive tutorial, found in the Help menu. That goes through the basics of creating a good structure for your work in the project, and then deciding how that structure should be implemented when compiling.

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I did a lot of tests with the Tutorial, and after noticing that a ToC is generated in a pdf file only if you save its compilation - choose “Open pdf in Preview” does not generate one, - finally, I found this sentence in the User Manual, p.680, 24.23. PDFSettings / Generate pdf outline : “For an item to appear listed in the pdf contents, it must be assigned to a section layout that generates a visible title.”

Got it, no way out!

Thanks a lot for the time you spent helping me, and sorry for dragging you there for no reason.

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I would phrase it like this: the option to add PDF features requires the Compile for setting in the main compile overview to be set to PDF. Whether you have the software automatically open the .pdf for you in Preview, or Skim, or any other PDF viewer is not a factor in that (or it should not be, that has nothing to do with how it is created and is really just a system macro that opens the file for you). If that seems to be a factor I would double-check the results, maybe in another PDF reader.

Now if you set Compile for to Print, and then from the print job window elect to save a PDF instead of printing, or to open in Preview, that isn’t really having Scrivener create a PDF file. At that point you are using macOS to save print data to a PDF, and we wouldn’t expect quite a number of dedicated PDF features to work (like internal clickable links), because of what use are these things in a stack of paper?

Thanks a lot for the time you spent helping me, and sorry for dragging you there for no reason.

Oh, that’s no bother at all. It’s good to have questions and answers posted in a place where others with the same question might find them. This kind of stuff is a little more detail that even the manual needs to convey.

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