I’m working on a Google Docs script and need some help. I want to make a cool navigation panel that shows all the headings in my document. But here’s the catch - I don’t want to use the built-in table of contents.
What I’m aiming for is something like the navigation pane in Microsoft Word, but for Google Docs. The idea is to have a sidebar with clickable links to each heading in the document.
Does anyone know how to:
Find the position of all headings in a Google Doc?
Create links to these headings?
Put these links in a custom sidebar?
I’ve been scratching my head over this for a while. Any tips or code snippets would be super helpful!
Having worked on similar projects, I can offer some insights. The key is leveraging Google Apps Script’s DocumentApp class. You can iterate through the document’s body using getBody().getParagraphs(), then check each paragraph’s type with getType() to identify headings.
For creating links, you’ll need to implement a custom solution. One approach is to use bookmarks at each heading position, then reference these in your sidebar HTML.
Building the sidebar involves creating an HTML file and using HtmlService to display it. You can dynamically populate this with JavaScript based on the heading data you’ve collected.
Remember to consider performance for larger documents. You might want to implement caching or limit updates to reduce processing time.
This project requires a good grasp of both Google Apps Script and HTML/JavaScript. If you’re new to these, it might be challenging but certainly achievable with some persistence.
hey there! i’ve messed around with this before. you can use getBody().getParagraphs() to find headings. for links, try using bookmarks at each heading. the sidebar is just HTML with some javascript magic.
it’s not super easy, but def doable. good luck with your project!
I’ve actually tackled a similar project before, and it’s definitely doable with Google Apps Script. Here’s what worked for me:
For finding headings, you can use the Document.getBody().getHeadings() method. This returns an array of all heading elements in your doc.
Creating links to headings is trickier. I ended up using the Position class to get the offset of each heading, then created a custom URL schema like ‘gdoc://position’ to jump to specific locations.
For the sidebar, I built a simple HTML interface using Google’s HTML Service. You can populate this with your heading links dynamically.
The toughest part was handling updates when the document changed. I set up a trigger to re-scan the doc periodically.
It took some trial and error, but the end result was pretty slick. Happy to share more specifics if you get stuck!