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    • Usage
    • Template Example: Basic TOC
    • Template Example: TOC Partial
CONTENT MANAGEMENT

Table of Contents

Hugo can automatically parse Markdown content and create a Table of Contents you can use in your templates.

Currently, the {{.TableOfContents}} page variable does not allow you to specify which heading levels you want the TOC to render. See the related GitHub discussion (#1778). As such, the resulting <nav id="TableOfContents"><ul></ul></nav> is going to start at <h1> when pulling from {{.Content}}.

Usage

Create your markdown the way you normally would with the appropriate headings. Here is some example content:

<!-- Your front matter up here -->

## Introduction

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

## My Heading

He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment.

### My Subheading

A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table - Samsa was a travelling salesman - and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer. Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. Drops

Hugo will take this Markdown and create a table of contents from ## Introduction, ## My Heading, and ### My Subheading and then store it in the page variable.TableOfContents.

The built-in .TableOfContents variables outputs a <nav id="TableOfContents"> element with a child <ul>, whose child <li> elements begin with any <h1>’s (i.e., # in markdown) inside your content.’

Hugo documents created in the MMark Markdown dialect do not currently display TOCs. TOCs are, however, compatible with all other supported Markdown formats.

Template Example: Basic TOC

The following is an example of a very basic single page template:

layout/_default/single.html

{{ define "main" }}
<main>
    <article>
    <header>
        <h1>{{ .Title }}</h1>
    </header>
        {{ .Content }}
    </article>
    <aside>
        {{ .TableOfContents }}
    </aside>
</main>
{{ end }}

Template Example: TOC Partial

The following is a partial template that adds slightly more logic for page-level control over your table of contents. It assumes you are using a toc field in your content’s front matter that, unless specifically set to false, will add a TOC to any page with a .WordCount (see Page Variables) greater than 400. This example also demonstrates how to use conditionals in your templating:

layouts/partials/toc.html

{{ if and (gt .WordCount 400 ) (ne .Params.toc "false") }}
<aside>
    <header>
    <h2>{{.Title}}</h2>
    </header>
    {{.TableOfContents}}
</aside>
{{ end }}

With the preceding example, even pages with > 400 words and toc not set to false will not render a table of contents if there are no headings in the page for the {{.TableOfContents}} variable to pull from.

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“Table of Contents” was last updated: October 13, 2017: Initial commit (a48229f)
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