I sometimes have titleless documents. I see the Binder uses the first line of the document to title them. Will a TOC work the same?
I don’t know what you mean by “a ToC”, as Scrivener does not really have much of a formal concept of that. Perhaps you are referring to ebook creation, where it does, but this is not specified.
At any rate, the core piece of configuration you are looking for is a function of the compile Format itself, which can opt to use the adaptive title of an item as a formal title:
- Open
File ▸ Compile...and double-click on the compile Format you are using, in the left sidebar. - In the Section Layouts pane, click the options button in the far upper right corner of the pane.
- You will find a toggle to Include placeholder titles for untitled items.
This will primarily impact whether the “grey text” titles get inserted into section layouts that use the Title checkbox (by default the heading formatting is simply omitted entirely for items without proper titles), and beyond that will inform how the automatically generated ebook ToC is presented.
I believe you have answered my question about creating a table of contents for the most part. I am not creating an e-book, however. I intend to output to PDF and RTF. Does that change the procedure?
Thank you.
Well, like I said before, Scrivener doesn’t have a formal ToC system outside of ebooks.
With RTF you would want to use your word processor to assemble the ToC, so that one can be set aside for later.
With PDF the idea is to fake it with some hyperlinks, so it doesn’t actually matter what your items are called at that point since the link text can be whatever you want. You’ll find instructions in Chapter 22 along with the convenience tools for creating a link list.
As I poke around, can I use Edit: Copy Special: Copy Documents as ToC to grab those placeholder titles?
If you’re to the point of creating a ToC, why not just assign a title?
What do you mean by that, given the Copy Special as ToC menu command, etc?
The difference is described in the link I provided above, as well as in the user manual. But if you need a metaphor, it is akin to how using tabs to indent paragraphs can indeed create the appearance of formal indenting, and maybe for something simple like a proofing PDF that may be argued as fine because it doesn’t really matter how it got to look that way, but I’d rather have a solid source myself.
But for RTF (or any other layout-oriented output), as with tabs, there is no good reason to use the copy as ToC command to fake formatting. It’s easy enough to make a real one, and doesn’t at all require one to do anything special with their binder titles. Presumably the placeholder headings are coming from the text, and thus should be styled, and therefore we already have what we need to insert a formal ToC after compiling with a single menu command.
In this case, I’m collecting poems which don’t have them and it would be convenient to have the first line used automatically to save time
Yeah, that’s fine to do, and the software has adequate tools for letting you work that way. We wouldn’t have put a lot of design and code into making title-less items useful both in and beyond Scrivener if you weren’t supposed to work that way.
Thank you. Off to try everything:)