Why no true TOC in SnapManual?

[perspexsphinx]

I think it would be really, really helpful if the SnapManual pdf had true TOC (Table of Contents), rather than just an index (even though it’s called a Table of Contents” on page 2), for ease of use in reading, especially on mobile devices etc.

Thanks.

[bh]

I don't understand, what do you mean by a "true TOC"? Every TOC I've seen is like this, listing the sections of the document and their page numbers.

[silver_star]

Make it clickable?

[bh]

Oh. Due to a pissing contest between Apple and Adobe, it's not possible to put active links in PDFs made from Word documents on the Mac. I suppose I could go through the PDF in Acrobat and manually put active links for each TOC entry.

I tried making a PDF from the .docx in Windows but it comes out hideous for some reason having to do with fonts. Maybe I'll try again harder.

[perspexsphinx]

Sorry if I’m using the wrong terminology but I think you now understand what I mean .

Perhaps “hierarchical bookmarks/table of content” is a more accurate term?

A good example is the downloadable MuseScore Handbook pdf.

I have used a couple of programs to create missing “hierarchical bookmarks/table of

contents”… JPdfBookmarks & jpdftweak-1.1, unfortunately both are a little dated. I

usually use JPdfBookmark but the SnapManual pdf is either too large, or complex for it

to work. However jpdftweak-1.1 seems to do the trick even if it might not be as user

friendly.

But it would be really nice, since the SnapManual pdf gets updated quite frequently

(which is really appreciated by the way) if it could be done in house so to speak. Since I’m

sure many read pdfs on small mobile devices and e-readers were this type of TOC is

super handy.

Thanks once again, and I apologize for the confusion.

[bh]

Most of those only work on Windows, where Word will do the right thing without help. I'm working on fixing this, though...

[dardoro]

Python module pdf.tocgen

For example, for the pdf version of Paul Graham’s book On Lisp , available for download on his website but comes without a table of content, we can use the pdfxmeta command to build a recipe file...

[bh]

Aargh that's rather complicated. I found AutoBookmark, an Acrobat plugin for Windows only, which does almost everything I want automatedly. The downside is that after my 30 day free trial it costs $219 or $264 depending on whether I want the batch feature. That's a lot of money but would be worth it if I can automate live links.

[toontalk]

Is there a tool that will also produce a decent collection of HTML files (semi)automatically? I'm sure I'm not the only one that prefers web page documentation to PDFs.

[bh]

Aargh. The Right Thing would be to maintain the manual in TexInfo form, which has converters to every output format you could possibly want.

Word purports to output HTML. I could look into that.

What I really want is for some young person to take over the formatting of the manual... but I'm afraid to say so because of course it has to be the right young person, and one who'll stay committed to Snap!. Then I could retire and roll up in a little ball. Maybe I'll stop feeling this way when the pandemic is over, if ever. (I'm vaccinated, and next Wed is when the CDC says I can go out into the world, but I'm not really going to be happy about it until we get past these mutations of the virus.)