Writing into the chapter through the table of contents?

[athanatos anomia]

I work with big manuscripts divided into loads of chapters. I have found that by using the built in system of formatting a Table of Contents by formatting both the title of a chapter aswell as an ingress they will both appear in the table of contents. With ingress i mean that I write a short synopsis of the content of the chapter.

Now, what I want to be able to do is to write directly into the ingress in the table of contents and thereby also changing the ingress in the chapter (or change the name of a chapter from the table of contents rather than having to go to the chapter itself)
This would help me a lot and spare me a lot of frustration going back and forth to the table of contents and the actual chapter some 700 pages away.

Is this possible to do? How?
Thanks!


Table of Contents

Chaptername 1
Ingress with information on what is in the chapter. Yada Yada Yada.

Chaptername 2
Ingress filled with a lot of information on this chapter. Yada.

Chaptername 3
Ingress which shows information on this one as well. Yada~.

[RoryOF]

I don't see any easy way to do this using the method you outline. One could use some form of OpenOffice fields as place-holders, but you might break the auto-generation of the ToC; loss of that could be a serious burden.

I suggest you reconsider your approach; perhaps you might use the Navigator (F5 key) for speedy movement about the document and make your insertions in the chapter synopses; you would still have to manually recreate the ToC before the new text will show. The Navigator also allows quick navigation back to the ToC.

[athanatos anomia]

Thank you for your reply.

One could use some form of OpenOffice fields as place-holders, but you might break the auto-generation of the ToC; loss of that could be a serious burden.

I have not used fields to any advanced extent before. Do you mean "cross-references" in fields?

I suggest you reconsider your approach; perhaps you might use the Navigator (F5 key) for speedy movement about the document and make your insertions in the chapter synopses; you would still have to manually recreate the ToC before the new text will show. The Navigator also allows quick navigation back to the ToC.

Do you think it would be easy to program/script it to make it work like I would like it to work?

[acknak]

OO Writer expects that all content for the Table of Contents should flow from the document into the ToC, not the other way around as you asked for.

If you want the chapter summaries to appear at the start of the chapters, under the title, then this can be done by applying a specific paragraph style on the summary, and configuring the ToC to include that paragraph style. The chapter titles, each with its summary, will be copied to the ToC.

[RoryOF]

I have not used fields to any advanced extent before. Do you mean "cross-references" in fields?


Do you think it would be easy to program/script it to make it work like I would like it to work?

I mean "placeholders"; see the Writer documentation chapter on fields.

It will not be easy to script, if at all possible - do not go that way (several months learning curve!!??).

I agree with acknak - the direction of flow in Writer is from the text to the ToC. To achieve some easier different method of working this you will have to change your approach (learning curve). My instinct is that using Navigator as I earlier suggested may be the way. Another approach may be to use some form of document generation system, but you would have to choose one and master its use. Remember that in Writer one can hide chapters/text by careful use of sections/conditional text (again, a learning curve).

My method of working on a large document is to place each Chapter in a separate section, as I am usually working only on one area at a time and hide sections containing curently irrelevant text. One might also use OO's Master Documents, but I have never needed to use that. However, I am not producing synopses to insert into a ToC, so my case will not necessarily apply.

[keme]

RoryOF's approach with sections looks to be a workaround. Elaborating on it:

• Use separate sections for each chapter's heading, ingress and body.
  For the current request, only each chapter body really needs to be separated to a section. Heading and ingress can be left at "base level", outside of sections.
• Hide the body sections of all chapters. You are then left with headings and ingress sections.
  This is similar to MS Word's "outline level" functionality.

The Navigator is still useful as a quick entry point for editing section properties (to hide/reveal sections as needed).

With this workaround you still edit the ingress within the document body, not in the ToC. However, when chapter body text is hidden, the appearance of your document will be similar to the ToC you describe.

To avoid confusion, it may be best to not generate the ToC until your document is finished. If you need the ToC in place (e.g. work document with frequent/continuous updates) you could also have the ToC in a section so it can be hidden while you work on the content.

[RoryOF]

It is my habit, when using Sections, to define each Section to have a differing background colour (usually a light pastel colour, but that is my choice). That way, while editing, I am clearly conscious of what is or is not within a Section, and also of my transition between sections.

When the document is finished I remove the coloured backgrounds by editing Section properties. OO can also be set to print while ignoring page background colouring.

Note that I am describing my method of dealing with book-length documents of perhaps 100K words and 20 chapters. I do not use this method for ordinary short 2-3 page documents.

[athanatos anomia]

I have tried around a bit. Will actually be using the navigator. It was actually quite convenient when using two screens.
Thanks!

[RoryOF]

I use a three screen setup: left screen for email and browser for lookup of information and monitoring Forum, Centre screen (larger) for Writer editing, right screen (small, old, tired) for Sidebar and Navigator.