"Sticky" Table of contents?

[philipp]

I find it very easy to get lost in long rich text docs. There are two issues: i) headings 1 through 4 are indiscernible, the differences are so small that its hard to visually tell the headings hierarchy. ii) the ToC should have an option to be sticky, i.e. be always on and not only when clicking on it. Connected to this It’s also not ideal that the expanded ToC covers over the rich text.

Thoughts?

[Michael_Ichter]

I think this makes sense if there was only one panel open. But if two panels are open side-by-side, then screen real estate quickly becomes an issue. How do you imagine this working when two panels are open?

[philipp]

well you can always “unstick”, and default could stay unchanged, right?

[alex]

We thought about pinning the ToC, but decided not to do it. Quite often a view has a few rich fields and two columns, so a pinned ToC could end up covering the rich-field content. Maybe a quick improvement would be to make the TOC open on hover instead of click?

Regarding the headers, could you share an example document? Here are headers from Google Docs, Notion, and Fibery, and I think there’s a pretty clear difference in size between them.

[philipp]

Thank you for your reply!

Yes side-by-side its clear and in relation its clear, but headings don’t always sit alongside each other

What is this heading (I am having difficulties to tell:

vs

vs

(maybe its just me though)

[alex]

I agree it’s not a right comparison, but this problem with visually distinguishing headings (and maybe other elements) exists in almost all editors. It’s still difficult to solve unless you make the size differences between H1–H4 very large.

[Michael_Ichter]

Or use other ways to assist in differentiating the levels, such as bold/italic or color, but I recognize that there’s not as much flexibility in this regard with markdown documents as there is in fuller document editing software.

[Lloyd_Bowen]

I agree with Phillip on both counts.

1. Most of our users have no idea the ToC feature exists. I would actually like a way to “insert” it into the rich text like you can in Confluence. It is still dynamic, i.e. it updates.
2. Heading sizes are not easily distinguishable. I cannot guess if I am looking at H3, H4, or bold text without looking at other text around as a reference. But you don’t want to make headings unnecessarily huge. How about making heading sizes dynamic? I.e. don’t make H1 massive if there are no other heading levels in the rich text? My rationale is, if H1 is used in isolation, it only needs to be noticeably different to the body text.