A table of contents is always placed at the front of manuals and provides readers with a list of the headings used in the manual, in the order the headings are found. The table of contents should list two or three levels of headings. For 2-level modular manuals, it should list at least the chapter and module headings.
Some authors like to provide a more detailed table of contents at the beginning of each chapter. These are called chapter tables of contents and are used in addition to the main table of contents. If you provide chapter tables of contents, the main table of contents should only reference chapter and module headings. The chapter tables of contents should reference the three heading levels used within the modules.
The table of contents in a modular manual does not list page numbers—it lists module numbers, since that’s how readers will locate the information they are looking for. In the right column where pagenumbers would normally be, list the current issue date of each module. Readers can then simply refer to the table of contents to see if they’ve got all of the modules, and the modules they’ve got are current.
