Add the ability to have hidden pages from primary TOC

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We are migrating one of our projects and would like to build a few pages but not have them show up in the Table of Contents (TOC). The use case is a troubleshooting page that is linked by other pages but doesn’t need to be in the general table of contents listing.

Previously in sphinx we used :hidden: option in .. toctree:: directives but jupyter-book uses this in the template when building toctree’s from yaml so they don’t show up in the content pane.

Describe the solution you’d like

Ability to add hidden: true to _toc.yml which would

1. keep the document in the hidden sphinx toctree
2. remove it from the left hand overall TOC column (in reference to sphinx-book-theme)

Example:

- file: chapter1
- file: chapter2
- file: troubleshooting
  hidden: true

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

Keep it listed in the TOC and visible

[choldgraf]

I’m not sure what you mean by “just hiding it from the left toc and not anywhere else”. The left TOC is the only place that it would show up (unless you’re wanting it to show up if you use a tableofcontents directive or something?). I’m just suggesting :hidden: because that’s how Sphinx handles this and our general approach is “do what Sphinx does so we don’t create extra complexity unless it’s really necessary”

[choldgraf]

In this case you’d just be adding :orphan: to the top of the page that you wish to exclude from the toctree. See https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/field-lists.html#metadata for reference