The question contains two issues:
- how to emphasise conveniently some parts of a document?
- how to collect sequences in document for easy reference?
Those points are independent from each other. Emphasised sequences cannot be collected automatically. Collected sequences are not automatically emphasised in any way.
##Emphasis
I assume your highlighting (whatever its form: bold, italics or highlight colour) is the result of a direct formatting, i.e. pressing a toolbar button, a keyboard shortcut or a menu item. Such a highlighting is not reliable because you can easily forget a step in a complex formatting and end up with a different mark up though it may superficially look the same…
I suggest you create a dedicated character style. Call it KeyItem. Note that Write comes with two built-in styles Emphasis and Strong Emphasis (resp. italics and bold). But their name may not reflect your intent.
If you don’t know what a character style is, read at least the built-in help or better the Writer Guide. This will allow you to control the formatting of your key parts from a single location.
- select a presently highlighted part or sentence
- remove the direct formatting with
Ctrl
+M
or Format
>Clear direct formatting
- apply character style KeyItem
For new key sentences, omit the two initial steps.
##Collecting sequences in a table
Your question and comments suggest(ed) to gather your “highlighted” parts in the table of contents (TOC). It is technically feasible for whole paragraphs but not for sentences or words which are not full paragraphs.
However, I advocate against because you mix two semantically different things in a single table: document structure (aka. chapters) and transient author “notes”.
Arbitrary parts (meaning not-full, partial paragraphs) can be gathered in an “index” table. There is a fundamental difference between a TOC and an index. Entries in TOC appear in document order, while entries in index are merged and sorted alphabetically with a list of pages where they appear.
To mark a sequence as being “indexable”:
Move to where you want the table to appear.
-
Insert
>TOC & Index
>TOC, Index or Bibliography
- in the Type menu, select
Alphabetical index
Later, after you have added new key sentences, right-click in the index and Update Table
to show the new entries.
##Other possibilities
###List of entries
If you really want the entries to be listed in document order (TOC-like) with hyperlink to quickly get back to them, you can do it, provided your entries are full paragraphs.
In front of each paragraph, Insert
>Field
>More Fields
. In the Variables
tab, choose Type Number range and Select one convenient category or create your own in Name (don’t enter anything in *Value).
Your parts will then be numbered.
Where you want the list of key point, Insert
>TOC & Index
>TOC, Index or Bibliography
. In the Type menu, select either Table of Figures
or Index of Tables
. Both are equivalent, they just preset other fields you can modify to suit your needs. In Create from Category:* select from the drop-down menu the number range name with which you marked your parts. Display will tell if you want the number only (Category and number
), the text only (Caption Text
) or both (References
).
###Notes
You can also create footnotes or endnotes. With notes, there is no need to mark a part, you just Insert
>Footnote & Endnote
>…
. The note itself maybe empty and you only have a sequence of note numbers which are clickable to jump quickly to the anchor.
With footnotes, you must navigate in every page to check whether you have some marked sequences. With endnotes, everything is grouped in page(s) at end of document.
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