Table of Contents

Add a table of contents with Insert → Table of Contents in the chapter list. Inkwell generates it from your headings and keeps it up to date — including the page numbers, which come from the real typeset layout rather than an estimate.

You do not edit the table of contents directly. Change a chapter title and the entry changes with it.

Which levels appear

Click Project Settings , then Table of Contents.

Show Levels decides how deep the listing goes: parts and chapters only, or down through sections, subsections, and subsubsections. Keeping it shallow is usually right for a trade book; a reference work often wants more.

Changing how it looks

The table of contents is laid out with a visual template editor. Click Edit Template in the same settings section. This opens an editable model of a single contents entry, which you lay out as you would any other content: choose fonts, set spacing, and decide where the chapter number sits relative to the title. To get the run of dots between the title and the page number, put the cursor in the title cell and set Leader to Dots in the Table Cell settings — the dots then run right up to the page number, and the template editor shows them stretching as they will print.

A title too long for one line fills the first line to full width before wrapping, so the page number sits close to the end of the entry. To even out the lines instead, switch on Balance Lines in the title cell's Table Cell settings: the entry keeps its number of lines, and the break falls after a comma or a colon where one is near the middle — "In the middle of the eighth century, / the Byzantine emperor…" rather than "In the middle of the eighth century, the Byzantine / emperor…". With a leader, the dots and the page number stay on the last line.

An ePub has no fixed pages, so it has no page numbers for the dots to lead to. Inkwell leaves the leader out there rather than trailing a run of dots into an empty space; the entries are links instead. The PDF is unaffected.

The editor shows one row per kind of entry, labelled down the left — Front Matter, Part, Chapter, Section, and so on down to Back Matter and Appendix — and each is laid out separately. Only the rows your project actually uses are shown, so the Appendix row appears once the project has an appendix in it. Front Matter and Back Matter print no number, because those chapters have none; the Appendix row does, and carries the word from Project Settings → Appendices in front of the letter.

What you build in a row is applied to every entry of that kind.

The same template mechanism is used for headings, headers and footers, and the list of figures, so it is worth learning once. See Chapter Titles, Parts, and Section Headings.

Linking

In the ePub and PDF outputs the entries are links, so readers can jump straight to a chapter. Nothing needs switching on for this.

Related listings

List of Figures works the same way: add it from the Insert menu and configure it under Project Settings → List of Figures, which also uses an editable template. See Figures and Images.