How to add a top navigation item without index page?

[holgerflick]

I have several pages that are accessible from the top navigation bar but do not have an index.md file. The navigation references a list of files. If I set an icon with icon: in the first file that is referenced in the navigation, this icon is not shown in the main/top navigation.

How can I achieve this? In the navigation below, only the Home index.md is able to deliver an icon for the main nav. It does not work with any of the other pages.

nav:
  - Home: index.md
  - Blog:
    - blog/index.md
  - Books:
    - books/book1-2023-12.md   
    - books/book3-2023-4.md    
    - books/book4-2021-7.md    
    - books/book6-2021-3.md    
    - books/book5-2020-5.md   

[kamilkrzyskow]

Hello @holgerflick,
I believe this question is a duplicate of
#6419
#6581
In short you can't do that by default, however you should be able to make a customization to achieve it, though no one has stepped forward from previous questions with a solution.

Also your books section seems oddly similar to a blog setup 🤔 Have you thought about using another blog plugin entry to manage your books? Minimal example: icons-home-for-holgerflick.zip

[kamilkrzyskow]

I didn't have an answer at first, but suddenly recalled that there is a redirect.html template:
https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material/blob/master/src/templates/redirect.html
I even think that someone already proposed this in some other discussion, but you could create an index page for those sections, and if putting content there really doesn't work well, just use that template to redirect to the actual first page in the section, and the icon would still be set to the index page.

Also I would probably be more strict with the paths for snacks like snacks/base64/01.md snacks/application/01.md and so on to provide context for them from the actual file structure, not just the nav in the mkdocs.yml file.

[holgerflick]

Thank you. These are all great suggestions. With regards to the snacks and other tutorials, in a future with infinite amount of time for hobby projects, I will generate those as well using an app with database... This will then definitely use the directory structure you suggest.

I was unaware that redirect is part of the repo. I used the redirect package before which - of course - did not handle icons well.

Next, I need to look into the font size of the navigation. I would like the font to be a bit bigger and also have a bit more weight. I am sure I can fiddle with a template...

[holgerflick]

... also I just found the awesome-pages plugin. That might open up new options as well for tutorial pages!

[kamilkrzyskow]

Next, I need to look into the font size of the navigation. I would like the font to be a bit bigger and also have a bit more weight. I am sure I can fiddle with a template...

This would be a CSS responsibility: https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/customization/#additional-css

.md-nav--primary .md-nav {
  font-size: .7rem;
  line-height: 1.3;
}

[holgerflick]

Thank you. I figured the nav-item.css would be the correct override to use. it worked right away. Even though my bad design skills show right away when I want to make the navbar bigger in general and add some logo etc. ;-)