Template:TOCfloat

Especially for articles which do not have a lede, a long Table Of Contents (TOC) can be visually unsettling -- "Hey, where's the article? There's just this long box!" Sometimes it's just the only right way to do things, as in Quotes/Speech. But for a more normal article like Daodan DLL, it would look bad if the article started after the TOC. Use this template to make the TOC a floating table, so that the article starts next to it, not below it.

Note that this template includes the magic word __TOC__, so it can also be used to reposition the TOC; if you don't intend to reposition it and just want it at its default location, that means you have to place this template between the lede (if there is one) and the first header in the article. Optional parameters:

• "side" -- this is passed to the float property, so your only meaningful choices are "left" or "right" (default is "left")
• "width" -- e.g., "300px" or "30%"; this works in unusual ways: you can make the TOC more narrow than it would be normally (forcing line wrap on header names that exceed that width), but if you supply a width that is greater than the "auto" width determined by the length of the longest header name, then the TOC stays at the same auto-width, but with a whitespace margin. When you use the template's default float:left style, this margin appears between the left-aligned TOC and the article text that wraps around it, which one could use to insert a small bit of extra space for aesthetic purposes. When you supply "side=right", however, excess width is still placed to the right of the TOC, making an undesirable white area as a sort of third column after the wrapped article text and the TOC.
• "limit" -- limits the TOC to a certain level of hierarchy; for instance, {{TOCfloat|limit=2}} would only show level 2 headers (==), keeping the table short.