Lalit Dashora
Lalit Dashora

Reputation: 485

Create Index page for ASCII doc

I have a lot of ASCII docs at different locations and I want to create an index page which should render these documents. But the condition here is that I want to list all the document link on the index page and if the user clicks on any link then only the document should be displayed. I don't want to display the documents below the table of content. I just want to display the table of content on the index page.

Is there any way to do this?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1567

Answers (1)

Brian D
Brian D

Reputation: 973

If I understand you correctly, you wish to generate a multi-document website, but you want an index page that displays just the TOC, with the other documents served elsewhere. I believe the best way to get this effect would be to generate chunked XHTML output using the DocBook toolchain. I believe this should be possible with Asciidoctor tools, but I have only implemented this particular post-rendering toolchain with the original (Python-based) AsciiDoc rendering tool, as documented here. This setup is configurable to generate a TOC index page that links to chunked output (you can configure the level of chunking).

As you have already figured out, AsciiDoc's automated TOC generation only works on the present document, which requires including the subordinate document to get their headings for the TOC. I can think of ways to sort of game this, such as to include just the heading of the included document (include::path/to/document.adoc[lines=1]) and then hiding even those headings with CSS or something. The problem is, the links in the TOC will be pointing internally, so you'd need to handle that somehow.

Another way is to use any of the static-site generators that support or can be readily extended to support AsciiDoc. What you're talking about is not an out-of-the-box feature that I'm aware of, but they all at least make it possible to generate an organized TOC-type navigation.

Upvotes: 0

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