A wiki page can be just a few paragraphs of information, or it can hold a substantial document. As with any document, when it gets longer it helps to have some organization to the information.
Using Header styles helps the author organize the information.
Then using an automatically maintained Table of Contents allows the reader to quickly find the desired section of the document.
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Overview
The Table of Contents ("ToC") feature works in conjunction with the paragraph styles h1 through h6. As a result, it is available in Wiki pages authored in HTML and Markdown, but not in Plain Text. This paragraph is in normal style, but the preceding one (the single word "Overview") has been marked with "h1" style. That style uses a larger default font size, and is automatically included in the ToC.?
A heading on a page that is to be included in the ToC box can be an external web link, or to another Wiki page, or to anywhere else.? What displays in the ToC box is the "Text to display" for the link?[what displays on the Wiki page] and does not need to be the actual URL.
Note: there currently seems to be a quirk in the operation of the ToC button: it will not insert the ToC marker unless the page already has at least one paragraph styled as a header.
?
Not WYSIWYG
One of the weaknesses of the current ToC implementation in HTML pages is that it does not operate in a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get ("WYSIWYG") fashion. That is, while you are in the edit mode for a page, when you use the ToC button to insert a ToC you will not see the generated ToC - instead you will see only a text marker, something that looks like this:
[?TOC:Example Table of Contents:1?]
NOTE: The text of the ToC should be in Paragraph format or it looks really funky. Check the formatting style.
When you Save the page, that marker will be converted into the filled-in and formatted ToC.
Once you've inserted the ToC marker into the page, do not use the button to update or edit the marker. Instead edit the marker itself (it is just text in the edit buffer). This is another way in which the current implementation is not WYSIWYG. A future improvement to the ToC feature may change this.
When working in Markdown pages, or as a work-around to issues with the ToC button in HTML pages, you can simply type the ToC marker. Follow the format shown above, with the keyword TOC, the Title, and the header depth separated by colons and inside of square brackets.
When you format text as a heading a default font size is applied, however once you apply the header style/level [thru Formats?drop-down; i.e. h1, h2, h3...] you can modify its format, i.e. how the heading appears on the Wiki page (font family, pt size, bolded, italicized, etc.)? How a heading appears on the Wiki page does not affect how the heading appears in the ToC block itself - that display box does not pick up the formatting of each heading.? You can, however, format how the ToC box itself displays using the basic text formatting tools (bold, italic) but not the extended formatting toolbar (font family, pt size, etc.) Example, go back and look: the ToC for this page was formatted as italic (by formatting the line?[TOC:Example Table of Contents:1] as italic.
When using a ToC, always start using Header 1, even if it looks too big, otherwise the ToC doesn't display properly. Sub-categories should decrease by next smaller size:
Header 1
- Header 2
- Header 3
- Header 4 and so on
- Header 3
A heading on a page that is to be included in the ToC box can be an external web link, or to another Wiki page, or to anywhere else.? What displays in the ToC box is the "Text to display" for the link?[what displays on the Wiki page] and does not need to be the actual URL.
References
Table of Contents feature in wiki pages, beta@ #6948, Mark Fletcher, 2016-03-28
Basic writing and formatting syntax, .
Link checking your wiki
There are extensions for Firefox for checking links:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkchecker/
If you are unfamiliar with the process,?Wiki Link Checking explains it step by step
The official Groups.io user documentation is in the Groups.io Help Center.