Parts in pdflatex Table of Contents

Question

I have a thesis in which I want to group some chapters together, using the \part command.

What I would like is to have the following:

• Chapter 1
• Part I
  • Chapter 2
  • Chapter 3
• Part II
  • Chapter 4
  • Chapter 5
• Chapter 6

So the last chapter should again be on the same level as the parts. In the table of contents of the text you can't really detect it, because Parts are on the same level anyway. The problem is that in the PDF, the chapter 6 is added under Part II. Does anyone know of a way to change that?

Answer 1

The fact that LaTeX does it wrong probably means that something is wrong with the structure of your document: \part is not meant to group chapters, but to devide the document in parts. The difference is that every chapter should be in a part.

Try 'introduction' or 'preliminaries' as a name for the part containing chapter 1.

It might be possible to work around, but you'd have to redefine command throughout the document. It might be worthwhile to use \chapter* for chapters not in a pat, step the chapter-counter manually, and manually call \addcontentsline with the right argument. However, this is IMHO bad use of LaTeX: for well-structured documents, the standard LaTeX commands should suffice.

Answer 2

The bookmark package can do this quite nicely, among other things. It also only uses a single pass to embed PDF bookmarks into the document.

\part{...}
\chapter{...}
\bookmarksetup{startatroot}
\chapter{...}