New Feature Idea: Another Side Column To Allow Naivgation To Sections Within The Same Page

[Humanities Clinic]

Dear All

When reading the HTML versions of PreTextBook books, I always wished there was another column for me that provided the contents of the *current* page (as opposed to the entire book's chapters).

Is there already such a feature which I am missing out on and which can be enabled?

If no, are there plans to implement this feature?

If no, I wouldn't mind implementing it and then doing a PR...

Anyone would second this idea?

[Andrew Scholer]

That idea has been floated but not implemented.

For works that chunk (produce individual pages) at the level of sections, and don't use many subsections, there would not be much to display. So it would likely need to be tied to a publisher switch.

Then there would be issues around where to put the column and what to do when there isn't enough room. Does it just disappear on smaller screens? Does the ToC disappear before it? If the book is designed with very long pages anticipating people will do lots of in-page navigation, what replaced them in a mobile view?

None of those are unsolvable, but it feels like the answers to those questions might depend on if you were authoring something that is more of a reference than a linear work. (e.g. how MDN handles "In this article" on pages like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/abbr)

Maybe there is a use case for a new theme that is specifically designed for that style of work?

Semi related, you can increase the Table of Contents depth to see subsections listed there:
https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/publication-file-common.html#common-toc-options

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