[Solved] Make Table of Contents hyperlink?

[aravindmiriyala]

When I insert Hyper-links, only Heading 1 is getting linked.
I took some time to figure out that I need to click Level 2 and change style to make Heading 2 as links.
Thanks!

[Hagar Delest]

There is also an All button at the right to apply the settings for all levels.

[Arouet]

I have OO3.1.1 on MacOSX server and I've followed the directions as stated several times. None of which worked. Anyone have any other suggestions? Thanks in advance.

[Hagar Delest]

Can you upload a sample file (see How to attach a document here)?

[kfoster@ebfulton.com]

Thanks for the latest 4.1.1

That said the Insert->Indexes and Tables->Indexes and Tables is still broken.

OpenOffice does create the Table of Contents. But I cannot get the 'links' to work - that is where when you hover the mouse over one of to TOC entries it says 'CTRL click to follow link.'

I cannot get it to create the links to other parts of the document. If I take the same steps on LibreOffice it creates a linked TOC. If I then open the doc in OO everything then works.

I have tried to read whatever docs I can find but to no avail. The TOC problem is the reason I dropped OpenOffice and started using LibreOffice in the first place. It's a must have for me. I just downloaded the latest 4.1.1 but it still does not work.

Maybe the OO developers could looks at the way LO does it? On LO all you do is Insert->Indexes and Tables->Indexes and Tables and it creates the Table of Contents with links to parts of the document working. You do not have to play around with settings of which you have no idea of what they mean.

[windowshater]

"by captainflack » Thu Jan 28, 2010 2:30 pm
Heavens, that dialog really is not intuitive. I've been reading this for 30 minutes and still haven't figured it out. Open office is a great product and deserves something better instead of this geeky input interface for ToC line formatting.
Now, after clicking the hyperlink button a couple of times I seem to have extra LE and LS buttons on the dialogue. It feels like I should be able to right click them and say "delete". THere appears to be no way to delete these extra bits I have added by mistake. Can it be so? Maybe someone can help point out to me how to delete extra things because I'm utterly stumped."

Phew. We are almost 7 human years later, thus about 3,569,892 years in computer time, and the dialog is still as confusing as the first users here have complained about.

Hagar or any other geek, could you please answer this important question from "captainflack" from Jan 28 2010?
"Now, after clicking the hyperlink button a couple of times I seem to have extra LE and LS buttons on the dialogue. It feels like I should be able to right click them and say "delete". THere appears to be no way to delete these extra bits I have added by mistake. Can it be so?"

I too have magically managed to confuse this ingenious dialog so much that it now presents me with this:
T, LS, LE, LS, LE, E, LS, LS, LE, E#, LS, T, #, LE

I have no idea what these cryptics aim to tell me, or if at all. And I am triple academic. So either this dialog was compiled(?) for another species, or it must have been pure luck that I achieved all the Masters.

Small pause for Humor now. What hidden button (or another such dialog?) has the inventor of this dialog provided that will delete all the cryptic nonsense that I was unconsciously able to generate?
And how should I click and select tabs and pull dropdowns and click such that after days of trying I will finally end up with a simple clickable table of contents?

That's all I wanted. But not even after reading this (long) thread and playing around with the dialog I have figured it out.

Oh, did I mention? I am pretty good with Regex, I use Regex a LOT (someone raised that point above).
But this dialog doesn't have the logic that Regex has.
And yet, I am sure that if I ever get a grip on it, I will love it, so powerful it is. I am sure.

[RoryOF]

Right click on the ToC and choose Edit Index/Table from the popup. Place your cursor in an LS or LE box and press delete. Repeat this for all LS/LE boxes.

Edit: the instructions above are merely to clear the mess into which windowshater has got his ToC. Setting up a hyperlinked ToC is described in my next paragraph.

Then move to the blank box farthest left, click cursor in that box and press Hyperlink button. Now move to the blank box farthest on the right, click cursor there, press Hyperlink button. Now exit the ToC edit procedure and the ToC should show blue hyperlinks.

There should be one LS at the start of a ToC constructor line and one LE at the end, none in between.

[windowshater]

Right click on the ToC and choose Edit Index/Table from the popup. Place your cursor in an LS or LE box and press delete. Repeat this for all LS/LE boxes.

Edit: the instructions above are merely to clear the mess into which windowshater has got his ToC. Setting up a hyperlinked ToC is described in my next paragraph.

Then move to the blank box farthest left, click cursor in that box and press Hyperlink button. Now move to the blank box farthest on the right, click cursor there, press Hyperlink button. Now exit the ToC edit procedure and the ToC should show blue hyperlinks.

Embarassing, clicking those letter/symbol buttons and clicking delete... I must have overlooked trying. lol
That works indeed. And your entire description makes it so easy now to create a clickable table of contents! Thank you so much, RoryOF.

May I suggest you post your instruction to the top of the thread? It says solved, but solved it's only now with what you wrote. Many won't find the last post here.

[Loridori4]

That is wayyy too complicated. All you have to do is go to the chapter content, highlight say "Chapter 3" and Insert>Bookmark>and name it Chapter 3. Then go to your TOC, highlight "Chapter 3 blah blah blah ", click on the hyperlink button in the toolbar, make sure "Document" is highlighted as your link source on the left side. Push the target looking button. A menu opens up. Choose bookmarks and find "Chapter 3". Click "Apply" in BOTH boxes. and then close them. Tada! You're done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrQ0b7_w4fY

[Hagar Delest]

Complicated???
The process described in the video is fully manual! If you move your chapters, the numbering of the bookmarks won't change (OK, the text will but not the name of the bookmark).

[annetheman]

I am on mac 10.12.6 (LO 5.3.2.2) and CANNOT for my life delete the infernal LS/LEs (similar klingon series as windowshater) even after cursoring into the LS and LE boxes, it becomes blue, I'm in there and then delete, delete, delete, delete--nothing--the delete button works otherwise in LO. I thought I got it, I was inordinately excited then no delete..
Is this a bug for mac? Anyone else experiencing this?

[Hagar Delest]

Can you upload a sample file (see How to attach a document here)?

[annetheman]

I uploaded a small sample of the document, you can see the many LEs and LSs, I would love to know what is going on. If you can cursor into the LSs and LEs and then they turn blue and you cannot delete them, I would feel better because then there is something objectively wrong with the doc (that can be fixed) and it isn't a weird environmental issue.

Thank You!
Anne

[RoryOF]

When I tried your file, I could right click on ToC, click on the Edit Index and Tables entry, then Entries tab, click on an LS or LE entry, then Delete it by the Delete key (not the backspace key). Backspace key doesn't work for this, Delete key does. I am using Xubuntu; mac keyboard may differ.

[annetheman]

Thanks RoryOF, for trying. That is exactly what I am doing. I have a 'delete' key on the keyboard and pressing 'delete' when LS/LE is highlit and it is not deleting those extra LinkStarts and LinkEnds. (Apple keyboard only has one key to make deletions).

[RoryOF]

There are quite a number of these LE/LS entries, I think about 10. Perhaps you are not deleting enough of them? Otherwise, you should wait for a Mac using volunteer to try your sample file.

Alternately, simple Delete the entire ToC and recreate it/

Edit: Try Fn + Delete. From a quick search Delete on Mac deletes character to the left (PC/Linux Backspace key equivalent), Fn+Delete deletes character to the right, which is what Delete on PC/Linux keyboards does.

[annetheman]

RoryOf--You are my hero thanks soooo much! I didn't think to investigate or google for a (right) delete but yes that works!!

[windowshater]

It seems like if I change the style to Default, the link doesn't work in PDF - however if the style is Internet Link, and i only edit the character style, the link works in PDF... Is this a bug? I'm using OpenOffice 3 on Ubuntu.

I see the same indeed, with OOo 3.0.1 (Sun version). You can file a report: [Tutorial] Reporting bugs or suggestions.

is there a way to make a ToC such that when it exports to a .pdf, the ToC lines "link" within the document? Which is to say, you click a line in the ToC that refers to an entry on p56, and then your .pdf instantly jumps to p56.

That's the way it works when you set the hyperlinks as described above. Check perhaps your PDF export settings in File>Export as PDF. The Export Bookmarks option has to be checked.

NB: you should update your forum user profile to make your configuration appear at right under your username.

Sorry Hagar, to come 11 years late (OMG). I usually avoid posting questions as a) I love oo writer and calc, and b) the moderators and others do such a great job maintaining the software and forum that (can I say?) I always feel a bit embarassed asking sth fearing that it likely has already been answered somewhere...
So I did indeed search for this as well...

Where you say above "I see the same indeed, with OOo 3.0.1 (Sun version). You can file a report", would this bug still apply to oo 4.1.4 (which I have) ?
And where you say "That's the way it works when you set the hyperlinks as described above. Check perhaps your PDF export settings in File>Export as PDF. The Export Bookmarks option has to be checked.", what if it IS checked?

I see it's checked for me:
- under General: export bookmarks
- and under Links: export bookmarks as named destinations, and convert document references to pdf targets, both of which sounds like it makes most sense.
- While Export URLs relative to file system, I really would like to avoid.

And yet, while ALL linking works wonderfully inside oo writer, in the exported pdf the content page links in v.4.1.4 still don't work, while all(?) other links do work.

To be honest I did not understand this bit "however if the style is Internet Link, and i only edit the character style": my content page entries' paragraph style list does not offer internet link at all, and my character style list does offer it but changing it there is to no effect: after double-clicking internet link and clicking elsewhere, then back, it is again greyed out as default.
And if I change it directly in Edit Index/Table (see there Character Style, which defaults to <none>) and choose internet link (say for level 1 entries), an even click Edit and make sure it's linked with Main index entry (because "All" incl. page # is not a choice), then again all this is to no effect: the exported pdf content page links still don't work (not even after saving the document first as odt then exporting as pdf).

Long story short: hence why I was wondering if this "bug"(?) still exists in v 4.1.4, or else, how you get it working? "That's the way it works when you set the hyperlinks as described above"

Maybe another user knows?

[Hagar Delest]

It hasn't changed it seems.

If you don't want the color and the underlining, the trick I use is to apply the Index link character style on the LS/LE tags of the ToC.
You can also create a style based on the Internet link style without the color and the underlining and assign that style to the LS/LE tags of the ToC. I just tried and it works.

If you still have an issue, please upload a small sample file.

[windowshater]

OMG, such simple solution! So now I chose your "index link" instead of my "internet link" which didn't work. Makes me almost embarassed I didn't understand that above, in case what I quoted from you was meant to be the same solution?

I hope everyone else is going to scroll down here: Under right-click Edit Index/Table, in tab Entries, just click LS and change its Character Style to Index Link. Then do the same to the poor LE thing (line end). And BANG! you got the entire content page entry lines nicely clickable, even without CTRL. More beautiful isn't possible.

Hey, only just saw it: I too was one of those (years ago!) who posted he doesn't understand the Content page dialog. Well, what I concluded back then became 100% true:
"And yet, I am sure that if I ever get a grip on it, I will love it, so powerful it is. I am sure. "

The dialog is damn powerful! It just takes (quite a bit of) out-of-the-box thinking to understand it in the first place. But all those past years I've now been using it like a Pro.
And from today, thanks to Hagar, even for exported pdf!

[Hagar Delest]

It was not that trivial in fact. At the time of this topic, I didn't know about the trick, I found it 2 years later in a wiki page (refer to that post. And indeed that's a good one!