How to get the Position of a paragraph in google docs API

Question

Using GAS, I'm trying to navigate paragraphs in a google doc and record their starting position so that I can display an interactive navigation menu in a sidebar. But I can't find any GAS method that returns the position of a paragraph (or an element for that matter), except when the cursor is within that paragraph. I thought of inserting bookmarks to retrieve their positions, but it seems that one cannot insert a bookmark without having first a position…

Am I missing anything?

Note that I'm aware of the fact that headings have hash locations (except for normal paragraphs) that are easy to retrieve using a TOC; but I can't use these hash locations directly in any GAS add-on, because the caja compiler prevents it. Besides, I'd like to list more than headings in my navigation menu.

Answer 1

Use the Document.newPosition(element, offset) method, where element is your Paragraph object and offset is 0.

For example:

var newParagraph = body.appendParagraph("some text");
var paragraphPosition = doc.newPosition(newParagraph, 0);