TOC and the book title

[Oldpilot]

Since I use h1, h2, and h3 heads when writing the title page, Sigil recognizes the title, sub-title, and author & publisher as chapters in the book. What is the best way to head this off? Shall I define h4, h5, and h6 to serve that purpose, or will that just result in having the title TOC'd as a very minor entry?

[Man Eating Duck]

Originally Posted by Oldpilot

Since I use h1, h2, and h3 heads when writing the title page, Sigil recognizes the title, sub-title, and author & publisher as chapters in the book. What is the best way to head this off? Shall I define h4, h5, and h6 to serve that purpose, or will that just result in having the title TOC'd as a very minor entry?

You'll probably receive different answers to this one. The easiest is removing the entries from the toc by deselecting them in the popup that appears after generating it in Sigil.

I would however advise you to avoid header tags for things you don't want to appear in the TOC. Headers have structural meanings which go beyond "making the font larger", for instance I believe they are also used by screen readers to partition content.

In the books I produce I usually want the title-page to appear in the TOC, so I leave the book title as a differently styled h1 tag, and make classes for the other title page paragraphs which I then style.

[Jellby]

You should not use heading tags for things that are not headings.

I use something like:

<p class="title">Book Title</p>
<p class="subtitle">Book Subtitle</p>
<p class="author">Author</p>
<p class="date">Date</p>

and style p.title, p.subtitle, p.author, and p.date the way I like them. Also, I usually have a specific CSS file for the title page, so it doesn't interfere with the main book styles, and I can share it easily with other books.

[Man Eating Duck]

Whatever Jellby says is pretty much the definitive answer

Styling is very much a matter of preference, but here are the definitions I use, renamed according to his example (several definitions, like font-face, are inherited in addition to these):

p.title { 
	font-size : 1.7em; 
	text-align : center; 
	margin : 3.9em 0 0 0; 
}
p.subtitle { 
	font-size : 1.33em; 
	text-align : center; 
	margin : 1em 0 0 0; 
}
p.author { 
	font-size : 1.1em; 
	text-align : center; 
	margin : 2em 0 0 0; 
}
p.date { 
	font-size : 1em; 
	text-align : center; 
	margin : 3em 0 0 0; 
}

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Oldpilot

Since I use h1, h2, and h3 heads when writing the title page, Sigil recognizes the title, sub-title, and author & publisher as chapters in the book. What is the best way to head this off? Shall I define h4, h5, and h6 to serve that purpose, or will that just result in having the title TOC'd as a very minor entry?

Adding to he other good advice:
When generating the TOC, there are (un)tick boxes to flag H tags to not be used for the TOC by Sigil


IMHO If you just want Size, Weight: you are best using the CSS to control these and NOT H tags (so old school HTML2 )

[Oldpilot]

That's great, thanks. (Yes, I have been unchecking the multiple TOC items for the title page, but it does make me nervous, and separately styling them will cheer me up no end.)

[meme]

Originally Posted by Oldpilot

That's great, thanks. (Yes, I have been unchecking the multiple TOC items for the title page, but it does make me nervous, and separately styling them will cheer me up no end.)

Unchecking the items in the Generate Table Of Contents dialog does not delete those headings/items from your document.

All it does it add a sigilNotInTOC class attribute to your heading (so it can remember you excluded it when you re-run the TOC generation), and then it excludes it from the items that will be put into your TOC. If you uncheck the Show TOC Items Only option at the bottom of the dialog you can see the entries are still there, just without a checkmark.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Jellby

You should not use heading tags for things that are not headings.

I use something like:

<p class="title">Book Title</p>
<p class="subtitle">Book Subtitle</p>
<p class="author">Author</p>
<p class="date">Date</p>

and style p.title, p.subtitle, p.author, and p.date the way I like them. Also, I usually have a specific CSS file for the title page, so it doesn't interfere with the main book styles, and I can share it easily with other books.

This is actually an "issue" at our shop. When we get noobs, a lot of them don't understand that headers are structural, having not ever really grasped what they were used for in Word. (In other words, no pun intended, they never used Word in Outline view, or for large, structured docs, and thus think that h1-h6 are just fancy large fonts.). I get a lot of submitted epubs, from applicants, as well, that use headers in lieu of CSS, because people don't understand that they're not just styling choices. Very frustrating, and something I wish would be more emphasized, wherever they are obtaining their education. (Not to disparage Oldpilot's efforts--I did it myself sometimes as a shortcut when I was starting out. )

Hitch