Some documents really deserve reading in a page sequential fashion. To keep individual pages manageable(editable), there are times when you want to break a long document into smaller pages, but still allow reading in sequential order. One approach is to %INCLUDE{}% the pages on a single page. The disadvantage is that you need to go through "a level of indirection" to edit the text.

An alternative could be to keep the small pages distinct, but add previous | next page links. That is tedious to do by hand, it would be nice to have some support in TWiki to create such links automatically. The purpose of this little section is to begin to brainstorm about how that might be done:

I can envision a tool, that includes something like an include page. You put the titles of all the pages you want read in a specified sequence on that page in the desired order. You press the magic button, and a TWiki tool goes to each of those pages and adds the appropriate links to buttons labeled "Prev" and "Next" (maybe two sets of such buttons, one at the top and one at the bottom of a page). This implies that the pages already exist, which, for now, seems as good an assumption as any. We could require that a "skeleton" of the buttons already exist on each of those pages, but that's really not necessary -- it could be nice as a sort of template to specify the location of those buttons.

If that "something like an include page" became a (real TWiki) TOC, then the pages could be navigated either by the "keep returning to the TOC and selecting the next topic" method or the sequential prev / next page method (as well as traditional TWiki methods, like from the WebChanges or WebSearch page, Google, or whatever.

For a robust tool, there should be a method to force the links to be redone if a new page is inserted on that TOC page (or just a rearrangement of existing pages).

-- RandyKramer - 21 Sep 2004

I've never used them, but it seems like NavPlugin or NavbarPlugin would do what you're asking, assuming they still work with lastest release.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 22 Sep 2004