If you've recently uploaded an epub of an entire manuscript, or you're working on an established project within the Laterpress text editor, you may see all of your chapters open at the same time. Sometimes, it's nice to be able to scroll through the whole book to read through it or pick out specific information. But what if you just want to focus on a specific chapter, or get to the end of a book quickly to add a new one? This article covers navigation options within the Laterpress editor, including our new update.

First, a quick reminder of existing functionality before we dive into what's new.

The Table of Contents Chapter Selection

On the top left corner of the editor is a dropdown menu you can click, showing a list of all of your chapters as they appear in the book's Table of Contents. Simply scroll to and click on the chapter you wish to edit and you'll jump there. When you do this, every chapter of your book still remains open at the same time.

So, what do you do when you want to reduce visual clutter and only see one chapter at a time? That's where our new Expand / Collapse features comes in.

Introducing Expand / Collapse

A new button has been added to the UI options on the top right corner of the text editor.

Clicking the Collapse button closes every chapter in the book, condensing it down to only display the chapter number (or custom numbering text) and the chapter name, as shown in the screenshot below:

You can navigate to the chapter you want to edit in several ways. Use the Table of Contents chapter select feature shown above. Scroll down with your mouse wheel, the Page Up / Page down keys on your keyboard, or using the arrows / bar on the far right edge of the screen. When you get to the chapter you wish to edit, you'll see the expand / collapse button has been added to the chapter-specific UI as well.

Clicking the expand button opens up the specific chapter you want to work on. Clicking it again will collapse it.

Whether your book has 20, 50, or 100 chapters, this new feature speeds up navigation within the editor, allowing you to focus on the whole book when you want to, or just a single chapter when more focus is needed.

The video below provides a brief visual walkthrough of the expand / collapse feature in action.