>The ability to render an automatic table of contents based on hash-tags or gather/conform citations and references programatically, has _never_ been a selling

>The ability to render an automatic table of contents based on hash-tags or gather/conform citations and references programatically, has _never_ been a selling point of word or any other editor until recently when markdown starting making this type of feature obvious. This is not true. Word processors have had this feature almost since the beginning. Microsoft Word autogenerated a TOC from text styled as a header all the way back in the nineties. WordPerfect 4.2 (1988) could generate a table of contents via specially tagged text. It also supported paragraph numbering and auto footnote and endnote handling. This was specifically added to speed adoption in the legal market and it worked. Law offices are some of the last WordPerfect holdouts today. I don’t believe Wordstar had such a feature though.