When do I need to invoke \phantomsection?

Question

Inspired by question When do I need invoke \clearpage manually?:

When do I need to invoke \phantomsection?

In what condition is invoking \phantomsection necessary?

Answer 1

The \phantomsection command is nessesary for hyperref to jump to the correct page, in other words it puts a hyper marker on the page. For example a starred section or chapter added to the TOC would normally refer to the wrong place without \phantomsection

\chapter*{Extended Summary}
\phantomsection
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Extended Summary}%
\markboth{Extended Summary}{Extended Summary}%

I normaly put in the preamble the command

\providecommand\phantomsection{}

Your document can then be compiled with or without hyperref without an error

Answer 2

I am providing a different answer to this question because the original answer is out of date.

The \phantomsection command is needed to create a link to a place in the document that is not a figure, equation, table, section, subsection, chapter, etc.

This is mostly used in conjunction with \addcontentsline or with \label and \hyperref. For example, the following code will create a contents line and a link to somewhere in the document.

\phantomsection
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Some place in the document}
\label{some}
This is just \hyperref[some]{some place} in the document.

Without the \phantomsection line, both the contents line and the link would point to the beginning of the current section (or subsection, etc.)

In previous versions of hyperref (before 2009-11-25), you also had to use \phantomsection with unnumbered sections (e.g. \section*) to prevent links from pointing to the previous section. This is not necessary in up-to-date distributions.

Answer 3

I've found none of the previous answers to work, but the below snippet works well:

\newpage
\phantomsection \label{listoffig}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{List of Figures}
\listoffigures

Originally found on: http://sumanta679.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/latex-list-of-table-list-of-figures-and-bibliography-in-toc/