Add Support for Table of Contents about questpdf

[MarcinZiabek]

The suggested feature is analyzed and planned to be implemented in one of the nearest updates. W know which changes are required to make it work. I am not able to provide any exact time roadmap though.

In case of any suggestions or requirements, let's continue the discussion here.

[MarcinZiabek]

Update: good news! I am working on this change right now. Please expect this feature to be available in the next release 2021.08. Any updates regarding API design and breaking changes I will post here.

[MarcinZiabek]

@MarkoH17 This functionality is available within the QuestPDF 2021.08 release.

Please refer to the documentation about placeholders in the PageNumber element: https://www.questpdf.com/documentation/api-reference.html#page-number

As well as to the internal example with a table of content: https://github.com/QuestPDF/library/blob/main/QuestPDF.ReportSample/Layouts/TableOfContentsTemplate.cs

[MarcinZiabek]

@MarkoH17 Thank you for your suggestion. Indeed, it is a missing feature that many may find really important. I am aware that the QuestPDF library lacks the ability to create tables of contents and show the total number of pages on each page. I am struggling with how to exactly implement such features. In most common implementations, it is common that you need to perform the layouting algorithm twice which may significantly reduce the performance. Once - to get information about page number where the given element has appeared, and then second - to draw the content with proper information. To some extent, with specifically crafted layouts, you may need an infinite number of passes.

I will try to fit this feature in one of the future updates. So far, I am planning to improve text rendering capabilities, debugging experience and redesign documentation.

Do you have any suggestions how the API may look like for such mentioned table of contents feature? I see it may be a special component/element or some kind of text tags that will be replaced with values during report rendering.

[MarkoH17]

@MarcinZiabek This is great! I will test this out on a few projects I have going. Closing this issue, as support for page numbers was added in the 2021.08 release.