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I followed Mike's solution from my first question:

Roman numeral page numbering

My next question is how to add entries (for the abstract and acknowledgements pages) into the table of contents.

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3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Assuming that the abstract and acknowledgement contents is typeset using a \chapter*{...}, you could do the following:


This will add a chapter-level (chapter) entry to the table of contents (toc) without a chapter number (\numberline{}).

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While you can manually add an entry to the TOC by \addtocontents or \addcontentsline, the order of commands can be important, especially

  • if you use hyperref, to get the hyperlink above the heading, not below
  • or if you add a section to the TOC, which is done by a macro but several pages long, such as by \listoffigures, \listoftables or \bibliography. A wrong order would add the last page to the TOC


  • use \addtocontents or \addcontentsline before \chapter* of \listof...
  • ensure the required page break before \addtocontents or \addcontentsline
  • for hyperref, add an anchor for the target


If you need that several times, you could define a macro for it.

Regarding the commands:

  • \cleardoublepage ends the page, prints out remaining floats if necessary, and ensures that the following text starts on a right hand page, as chapters in books commonly do, if in twoside mode. \clearpage, in contrast, would start the new page on a left or a right side.
  • \phantomsection is a command of the hyperref package, which creates an anchor at this location, similar to \hypertarge, which can be referred to - \addcontentsline does it implicitely. Without \phantomsection, \addcontentsline would refer to the previous anchor which could be undesired.

The package tocbibind makes putting commonly added chapters/sections (bibliography, TOC, index) to the TOC easier. It's integrated in the memoir class, while KOMA-Script classes support this purpose by class options such as bibliography=totoc.

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You've used \cleardoublepage, \phantomsection - could you be more specific about those two ? –  Grzegorz Wierzowiecki Feb 1 '12 at 18:47
@GrzegorzWierzowiecki I updated my answer and explained the commands. –  Stefan Kottwitz Feb 1 '12 at 19:04
Thank you, it's educative piece of tex code for learning latex :). –  Grzegorz Wierzowiecki Feb 1 '12 at 19:11
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Instead of tinkering with \cleardoublepage, \phantomsection, and \addcontentsline, I suggest to

  • use \chapter (the non-starred version) also for the Abstract and Acknowledgements,

  • set the secnumdepth counter to -2 (i.e., no sectioning level is numbered) before the Abstract,

  • resetsecnumdepth to 2 (default for the report class) before the first proper chapter.

Works also with hyperref.





\setcounter{secnumdepth}{-2}% default for "report" is 2






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