How does the table of contents work in my flipbooks?

A Table of Contents (ToC) helps readers to navigate your FlippingBook Online flipbook quickly and easily. Your readers can simply click on one of the entries in your ToC and it will take them to the corresponding page right away.  For flipbooks up to 20 or 30 pages, it may be a luxury, but your readers will really appreciate it in the larger ones.

First, the bad news: FlippingBook Online doesn't have a built-in editor to create and edit Table of Contents yet. Good news: with a bit of work, you can create one anyway.  If you import a PDF with bookmarks, we will use these bookmarks to create a ToC automatically. So to create a ToC, you will need to create bookmarks in your PDF before uploading it.   

This article will give you answers to the questions below:

• How to add Bookmarks to your PDF?
• How to use the Table Of Contents?
• How to set up a table of contents to open by default?
• My ToC contains lots of additional entries, what to do?

How to add Bookmarks to your PDF?

If you created the PDF with the help of a professional designer, then you can of course ask them to create bookmarks. For them, it should be a bread-and-butter task. But there are several other ways to add bookmarks yourself too.

• You can add bookmarks to your PDF in paid software Adobe Acrobat – not to be confused with Adobe Reader, a free PDF viewer!
• You can also do it with other PDF editors. For example, jPDFBookmarks is a free open source solution that you can install, open your PDF, add the bookmarks, and save it.
• There are also free online tools such as Sejda. You upload your PDF there first and then edit the bookmarks online. However such tools often have a limitation to the number of pages or the size of PDF you can upload.

After you have added bookmarks, you can open your PDF in Adobe Reader to check if they're there. Here is what a PDF with bookmarks looks like in Adobe Reader:

Once the bookmarks are added, you can upload your PDF to FlippingBook Online. The table of contents will be created from the bookmarks automatically.

How to use the Table Of Contents?

If your flipbook has a table of contents, your readers will be able to show or hide it by pressing the Table of Contents button at the bottom bar. It will show up next to your flipbook.

Readers can navigate to chapters or sections of your flipbook by simply clicking the links in the table of contents.

How to set up a table of contents to open by default?

You can also set up your flipbook with the ToC showing up immediately upon opening the flipbook. You can do that as follows:

1. Open the list of your flipbooks.
2. Hover over the flipbook you'd like to change and click on the Customize button.
   
3. Expand the Controls section, find the Pinned Sidebar setting, and select the Table of Contents from the list of options.
   
4. Press Finish in the top left corner to save your changes.

The next time someone opens your flipbook, they will immediately see the table of contents too.

My ToC contains lots of additional entries, what to do?

Sometimes the Table of Contents contains lots of additional entries which you have never added manually:

Here we see there is no content, just the slide numbers.

The reason this happens is that your original PDF contained such Bookmarks. One of the solutions here is to completely switch off the ToC by going to Controls:

Once you switched off the option, don’t forget to click on the button Finish to apply the changes.

However, the best way to fix this issue is to go to the part of this article How to add Bookmarks to your PDF and delete your old Bookmarks, add new ones. Once your new PDF is ready, replace the PDF in your flipbook and it will have a correct Table of Contents.

Next steps

• Have you created a flipbook without ToC at first? No problem – you can easily replace the PDF in it without redoing all your previous work in FlippingBook Online.
• Check out how ToC and other interface elements will look on mobile with our article Will my flipbook look good on mobile?