Contents Page is always empty

Questions & Help
1

As I understand from the Logseq documentation and from some posts, the Contents.md file is to generate a hierarchical outline based on your current document open if you set it up with correct header and block/child block relationships.

Is there any other documentation or instruction to this page?

It is ALWAYS empty for me and never displays anything and I cannot figure out how to get information to display there.

In Obsidian there was similar functionality to see your outline in the side bar and this is what I was hoping for when writing longer notes.

Thank you in advance for any help on this!

– Sam

2

The Contents.md file stores the information you put into the Contents page on the right pane (can be accessed with t + r then select Contents tab).

What Contents page does is quite different from what most people reasonably expect, it is not the “contents” of current page/document in this sense: Table of contents - Wikipedia, it will not generate hierarchical outline or anything like that. Logseq’s take on this idea is quite different.

Contents page is simply another page that you can put anything in. The distinguishing feature of this page is, it is always anchored to the right pane. That’s why it is powerful and flexible.

  • It can function as table of contents for current document if you wish, in that case you need to add block references to the headings/subheadings in your current document. These things won’t be generated for you.
  • It can function as a collection of shortcuts to anywhere in your database, you can embed blocks, write notes here, e.g the big picture of what you work on, concepts, themes.
  • It can function like the browser’s favorites/bookmarks or recent tabs with an extra feature: you can create hierarchy of these “tabs”/references you saved here and write notes about them.
  • You can edit multiple blocks from different corners of your database by embedding them here. The other way to edit multiple blocks is opening them on the right pane by shift clicking, these blocks will be below the “contents” page, and they won’t show up on the right pane next time you open logseq.

Why it is called “contents” I don’t know, maybe they run out of short names, maybe they want to give a hint as to a typical use case, but I think of it as “fixed page on the right pane”, and it is a much more general idea.

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