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Is there a quicker way of adding a TOC at the top of an article

  • 20 April 2023
  • 7 replies
  • 160 views
A

I am in the process of creating a large help center with long articles. We are organizing many of the articles (as suggested) with anchored links to the Heading 1s within the article at the article’s beginning. But creating the TOC  at the top is very time consuming as you have to enter the TOC text, scroll down to copy the anchored link, scroll up to link the heading, scroll down again, etc. Is there a faster way to do this - i.e. - autogenerate a TOC for all heading 1s or at the very least, copy the heading text and link at the same time? 

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Best answer by Daniel M15 26 April 2023, 17:55

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Nathan Sudds
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@Andrea Riser Unfortunately, I don't think there's an easier way at the moment.  It would be helpful if the links were using some form of standard where you could dictate the link using #tag endings on the page url instead of having to copy the link each time and that link changes if you reorganize the page from what I understand.

 

Ideally the Intercom team would implement a TOC block style similar to Notion where you could just add it at the top to create the TOC automatically.

 

But I'm not currently aware of anything like this available, maybe there's already requests for this on the roadmap if not we can post a Feature Request for the Product Team. 

 

Now you've got me curious though on the best way to do this easily with the current tools because it does seem tedious if you've got a very involved article. 

 

 

Nathan Sudds, Consultant / activelabs.ca
Daniel M15
Userlevel 2

Hey @Andrea Riser! Daniel from Customer Support Engineering here 🔧 

 

I think that @Nathan Sudds’ answer sums the situation up well - though I’m wondering if you’d benefit from using our API to do this if the UI is too cumbersome? You can return a list of all articles, which will give you a JSON text form of all of their contents, and you could then use the update endpoint to make the relevant updates to the TOC. I know it’s not “automatic”, but I think it could be a little easier for you than clicking around in the UI! Let me know if it helps 🙌 

Daniel McGovern, Customer Support Engineer @ Intercom
Beth-Ann
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Hey @Andrea Riser, I’m Intercom’s own Help Center manager 👋 Jumping in here because I’ve just found out from our Product team that we’ll soon be releasing:

  • Table of Contents for articles: with this feature your customers can easily locate and jump to the most relevant sections of an article, enhancing their reading experience and saving them time and effort. Once enabled, TOC will appear on all articles and will be automatically generated from all H1 or H2 headings in an article. 

I’m super excited this feature will be here soon and hope it’ll make things easier for you too! Keep your eyes on the What’s new tab in your workspace to find out when it’s available.

Nathan Sudds
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@Beth-Ann That’s great news! This will be a big improvement to not have to build them out manually.   

Some feedback to pass along to the team working on this though -- it could be helpful to have this be configurable in some way to either only be enabled on some articles or be turned on by default but disabled for some articles.  I could see not wanting the TOC on all articles depending on the use case, etc.  To me it feels like having it optional on the individual article level would give teams the best combination of tools rather than a general on/off for all articles. 

It all depends how it’s implemented of course but I’m sure you’ll have some teams beta testing to give more feedback.  

Hope this feedback is helpful in the meantime!

Nathan Sudds, Consultant / activelabs.ca
G

Was this ever released? I can't find any information about it.

Beth-Ann
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@Greg Larsen yes the team did release this one 😃 Here’s some more info about it. 

G

Ah, Thank you.  I misunderstood this functionality.  I don’t want a TOC on every topic.  I want to be able to insert a min-TOC of a particular heading level anywhere I want.  Like one can with Confluence. I guess that’s not possible.

 

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