Converting to EPUB without making a TOC

[kovidgoyal]

You post is titled "Converting an epub without making a TOC". Make up your mind. Are you trying to create an epub without a TOC or one with a toc that points elsewhere?

calibre does not generate a contents list when creating epub files. If your epub has a toc as part of its main text, then that toc was present in the input document.

Do this

echo test > test.txt && ebook-convert test.txt .epub && ebook-viewer test.epub

You will see that the epub has no inline TOC, i.e. it has only two pages, the cover and a page with the single word test on it.

[rrt]

The trouble is, TOC means two things: for me, it originally meant the table of contents you see in the book (that is what I want to remove). But it also means the toc.ncx, which as you say, is mandated by the EPUB spec. So, I have already made up my mind, but because of this ambiguity, I fear I have not previously made myself clear.

Thanks for the information about TOC creation: indeed, the generated HTML from which the EPUB was generated contains a TOC, so it seems I just need to suppress that. If I remove it manually, I get the result I'm after. Hence, I shall chase the problem up the toolchain (the next step being in LaTeXML).

Thanks very much for your patient help!

[Agama]

[Sorry! another out of step redundant posting. I must've forgot to press refresh]

[rrt]

Calibre, a Nook and FBReaderJ all open the book at the trivial table of contents, which is unhelpful.

As kovidgoyal pointed out, the problem was actually in the HTML I used to generate the EPUB. I have now modified my conversion script to remove the trivial TOC information from the HTML before calling ebook-convert; Calibre then generates the desired empty TOC, and the various readers open the book at the start of the story.

The only remaining task I have is to modify my script so that it only removes the TOC when it is trivial: obviously I do not want to remove non-trivial TOCs.

When I've done this I'll publish my script for other users of LaTeXML.

[JSWolf]

I have a Sony Reader PRS-650. The toc.ncx does NOTHING to the ePub when I am reading it. It has no effect where the ePub opens. When I first open the ePub, it opens at the first page which is the cover. The toc.ncx does not even display unless I decide to display it.

So what does toc.ncx do that you don't want it to do?