The Document Outline/Table of Content Generator

You can use the Document Outline panel to navigate your open Markdown documents and generate a Table of contents for longer documents at the cursor position.

Here's what the Document Outline looks like:

you can also drag and drop Document Outline links directly into the open editor:

Toggling the Document Outline

To toggle the Document Outline availability you can use View -> Document Outline toggle to turn the outline panel on or off.

Navigation and the Document Outline

The primary use for the Document outline is to provide quick document navigation. You can click on any entry to navigate to that part of the document quickly. In reverse, navigating the Markdown document in the editor keeps the Document Outline in sync to the nearest header above.

The Document Outline sidebar is available only on Markdown documents and disappears on non-Markdown docs.

Embedding a Table of Contents

The button in the toolbar lets you generate a Table of Contents as a list of Markdown links that point to the internal links of the page.

The TOC is embedded into the Markdown document at the current cursor position, as a list of markdown tags delimited by HTML comments that identify the table of content and allow the TOC to be replaced on subsequent re-generation.

The generated TOC picks up header tags that follow the current content only. In other words the TOC only shows links of the content below the cursor position. This is meant to remove the document header, or introductions which often are not meant to be in an explicit outline.

Here's an example of a generated TOC:

<!-- Start Document Outline -->
* [Weblog Publishing](#weblog-publishing)
* [Installation](#installation)
* [Links](#links)
* [Show your Support](#show-your-support)
* [Features](#features)
	* [Markdown Editor](#markdown-editor)
		* [Image Features](#image-features)
		* [Editing Features](#editing-features)
		* [Output and Selections](#output-and-selections)
		* [Theme Support](#theme-support)
		* [File Operations](#file-operations)
		* [Weblog Publisher](#weblog-publisher)
		* [Non Markdown Features](#non-markdown-features)
	* [Command Line features](#command-line-features)
	* [Why another Markdown Editor?](#why-another-markdown-editor)
* [Acknowledgements](#acknowledgements)
* [Spread the Word about Markdown Monster](#spread-the-word-about-markdown-monster)
* [License](#license)
	* [Contribute - get a Free License](#contribute---get-a-free-license)
	* [Warranty Disclaimer: No Warranty!](#warranty-disclaimer-no-warranty)
<!-- End Document Outline -->

You can update the outline at any time and will be prompted if a TOC already exists. If you continue, the existing document TOC is replaced with the new current updated one.

Setting the Max Outline Level

The default max outline level is H1 - H4 meaning all headers up to H4 are included in the outline and Table of Contents creation, but H5 and H6 are not.

You can customize the outline level via the MaxDocumentOutlineLevel configuration switch in MarkdownMonster.json or by using the Document Outline context menu:

The textbox lets you type in a number between 1 and 6 to specify the max outline level. 3 or 4 generally will be a good outlining level to use (4 is the default), but it depends on your writing style.