Missing NCX in .mobi after conversion

[ignis]

Hi.

I had a .mobi book that I didn't like the formatting of. I converted it to .epub with Calibre 0.7.47, edited it around a bit in sigil 0.3.4, then converted it back to .mobi in Calibre.

The problem is that the end result does not have an .NCX file, though it has a working TOC (according to Kindle Previewer 1.5). The question is: can I somehow force Calibre to create an .NCX file for that particular .mobi book?

Thanks in advance.

[ignis]

I did a bit of experimenting and this particular problem of missing NCX file occurs every time a document is converted from .mobi to .epub and then back to .mobi. It's not really THAT big of a dea, but it is somewhat annoying to NOT have chapter marks on the progress bar. And I still don't know how to add an NCX file to an existing .mobi book.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[ldolse]

It sounds like your epub doesn't have a Table of Contents then. Make sure the Epub has a working TOC according to Calibre's reader or Adobe Digital Editions before you convert your epub back to Mobi.

Check out this thread for a tutorial/discussion on getting Chapter detection to work:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=122222

You need to do this when you convert the initial mobi to epub. Use Sigil if all else fails, but make sure you have working epub TOC before you convert back to mobi, or make sure that structure detection is set correctly.

Edit, important item I forgot, and this may be the core of your problem:
Calibre is probably using your mobi's ncx to generate a TOC during the initial mobi->epub conversion. You most likely have a TOC at that point, so my advice above isn't neccessary at that point.

Sigil destroys the existing TOC when you edit the file in Sigil. So Calibre may have generated a TOC during mobi->epub conversion, but then Sigil destroyed it because it didn't meet Sigil's standard method of generating a TOC.
In order to fix that you need to either manually rebuild the TOC in Sigil by wrapping each Chapter heading in heading tags, or you can try to enable chapter detection on epub-Mobi conversion - this will require following the tutorial linked above.

[ignis]

Thanks a bunch ldolse! While your advice did not help me solve the problem (ToC in Sigil was already working, as was the dedicated ToC page), it did point me in the right direction.

The solution was annoyingly simple. All I had to do was tick off the "Force use of auto-generated Table of Contents" in the Table of Contents tab. Reconvert and bang, fully working ToC with chapter tick marks.

Thanks again!

[ldolse]

Originally Posted by ignis

Thanks a bunch ldolse! While your advice did not help me solve the problem (ToC in Sigil was already working, as was the dedicated ToC page), it did point me in the right direction.

The solution was annoyingly simple. All I had to do was tick off the "Force use of auto-generated Table of Contents" in the Table of Contents tab. Reconvert and bang, fully working ToC with chapter tick marks.

Thanks again!

If you checked that box that will cause Calibre to rebuild the TOC based on the Xpath in structure detection - if the xpath is wrong then you'll get no TOC. At that point there are two fixes - the one you used, which is simpler and definitely the best solution in this case, or by fixing the xpath itself, so the tutorial still potentially applies.