User Guide Table of Contents and/or Index

After working with LO user guides, I have come to the opinion that the Table of Contents (ToC) would not be very helpful to a LibreOffice user when trying to find information on how to do something with text to images. Looking at the ToC of a user guide it is very sparse in providing information for users.

Solutions to this problem are as follows:

  1. Include the ToC from the individual chapters into the user guide ToC. This would increase the number of pages taken up by the ToC, but would provide more information for a LibreOffice user.

  2. Retain the chapter ToC when a chapter is added to a user guide. This would provide more information at chapter level to a LibreOffice user when trying to find out how to do things. I have created user guides using this method and they did look very good and were reasonably informative.

  3. Create an index for a user guide at the back of a user guide. However, an index should be created by someone who has good knowledge of indexing. A poor index is no index at all and would make a LibreOffice user guide look very poor. My knowledge of indexing is almost non-existent. I know what to do, but that is my limit.

It would be good to know what other people think of the above so that we can go forward in improving the usability of LibreOffice user guides.

Regards
PeeWee

Hello @PeeWee

For printed books it can help, while for electronic file it will require leafing pages and pages.

The PDF will also have a TOC on the left side with many more entries.

I’m OK… that is easy. Everithing is aready there.

I also agree that an index can be a good thing. The trick is to use the concordance file for alphabetical indexes. Translated books will have to get a translated concordance file.

https://books.libreoffice.org/en/WG252/WG2515-TOCsIndexesBiblios.html#toc20

https://help.libreoffice.org/25.8/en-US/text/swriter/01/04120212.html?System=UNIX&DbPAR=WRITER&HID=modules/swriter/ui/tocindexpage/fromfile#bm_id3150766

Cheers
Olivier

Update:

The Calc guide has all Index entries already set (I think it was by @stevefanning ) and it can be added easily.

However

  1. The index does not have an hyperlink setting, so no way to jump to the page in a click as we have for the ToC.

  2. One column or 2 columns? Use tab character?

  3. Is there a rule for main entry, 1st key, 2nd key… ?

Cheers
Olivier

The index in e-publications does not make much sense since there is a search in the viewers (html or pdf)
The index can be useful in printed publications but are currently rarely used.
As @ohallot has mentioned, when creating the alphabetical index, hyperlinks are not created,

  • All this, added to the work of creating the index and shortage of collaborators in the documentation I do not think it is productive.

There is a bug open for adding hyperlinks to the alphabetical index.

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71385

cheers
olivier