Overview
An important characteristic of longer Word and Word-compatible documents is that they have usually been organized into sections to make their content more easily accessible. The word processor's feature for doing this is extremely convenient: simply mark the title of each section with a special paragraph style used to indicate structure. The Word processor can then present these in its outline view. You can also use the word processor's function for creating a table of contents at the beginning of the document. This function creates an automatically updateable field that assembles the current list of sections and displays their page numbers.
You can reproduce this same table of contents online as an expandable, collapsible and clickable table of contents. To be able to do this properly, it's important to understand a few points about how Word documents are structured:
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A structured document is one where the author has used paragraph styles, unique formatting or unique text patterns (such as leading text like "Section 1.2.3") to indicate where new sections or chapters begin.
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Although the layout of a document is page-oriented, its structure is topic-oriented. Each topic begins with a section title and ends after the last character before the next section title.
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Structured documents may be hierarchical. Although sections follow each other sequentially in the source file, their styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3) or formatting (Bold-18 points, Bold-14 points) or text patterns (1.2, 1.2.1) indicate the depth of the topic. From this indication of depth, it is possible to represent main topics, subtopics and sibling topics.
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All document content that occurs before the first topic is referred to as the front matter.
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