Help generating TOC

[Diabolikul]

Hello forums. This is my first post here.

I just downloaded Calibre tonight. I've had a Kindle since the first one came out and generally just haven't done much but read books.

I need help generating a Table of Contents for a book that my brother-in-law is in the process of writing. I can't figure out how to make an XPath expression that will find the proper phrasing and generate a table of contents.

He's decided his chapters won't be like "Chapter Two", etc.

The denotion of a chapter will be a single word in BOLD CAPITAL letters for the geographic location of that chapter.

For instance:

DALLAS

TAMPA

LONDON

The only places in his book that will have all bold capital letters will be the chapter headings.

Calibre has located his more obvious items such as Prologue and Epilogue, which by the way also happen to be in BOLD CAPTIAL letters. I guess it just looks for those types of words automatically.

Can anyone help me figure out how to help my bro in law not only generate a table of contents, but just start a chapter on a new page? Right now the chapters all run together. You can see the BOLD CAPITAL geography and tell that you are in a new chapter, but otherwise you'd never know. The last sentence of the previous chapter is one line above DALLAS.

Can Calibre help me find those BOLD CAPITAL letters, insert a page break and generate a TOC or do I need to find some way to do this manually or use a different program or whatnot?

Any help is very much appreciated.

The source material he's given me is a PDF.

Thanks in advance.

Carl

[itimpi]

PDF is a terrible format for processing into another format. Since your brother-in-law is in the process of writing it, cannot he provide an alternative format that would be better.

As an example, if he is using Microsoft Word and saves the files as either RTF or HTML(filtered) then the headings can simply be found by the fact that they have a heading style associated with them.

[Diabolikul]

Originally Posted by itimpi

PDF is a terrible format for processing into another format. Since your brother-in-law is in the process of writing it, cannot he provide an alternative format that would be better.

As an example, if he is using Microsoft Word and saves the files as either RTF or HTML(filtered) then the headings can simply be found by the fact that they have a heading style associated with them.

Thanks. I asked him the same question, can he get it to me in Word format or however he's typing it up. He's a doctor with 3 kids and a wife with Crohns so I thought I might be able to do this conversion quicker than he can get back to me... Never know though, he might respond faster than I think!

If I know him, he isn't using any styles though. He's simply doing the new chapter names in BOLD CAPS rather than using preformated headings, body, etc. He's one of those 2 finger typists... HA!

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Diabolikul

Thanks. I asked him the same question, can he get it to me in Word format or however he's typing it up. He's a doctor with 3 kids and a wife with Crohns so I thought I might be able to do this conversion quicker than he can get back to me... Never know though, he might respond faster than I think!

If I know him, he isn't using any styles though. He's simply doing the new chapter names in BOLD CAPS rather than using preformated headings, body, etc. He's one of those 2 finger typists... HA!

If he does the Bold CAPS thing (and NOT PDF), you might be able to tag those with H1,H2 or H3 with a REGEX Search and Replace.
As others have pointed out: RTF or (Doc saved as) HTML (Filtered) is the way to go and will save a ton of time and effort.