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Old 09-29-2012, 01:11 PM   #1
jackibar
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Sigil Adding Page Breaks in TOC!

Hi, everyone... I've done several books into Kindle format now with no problems. The "method" I'm using is:

1. Create a "clean" html file manually (yeah, I know - but I'm a programmer at heart!).
2. Import this file into Sigil (I'm on a Mac).
3. Create the chapter breaks, ncx TOC, etc.
4. Open in Calibre and convert to .mobi format.

So far, this has been working fine! However, I have a book I'm working on now that for some reason the "inline" TOC is rendering a page break after each Chapter Heading text when previewing in Kindle, as well as Kindle Previewer. I've checked the .ePub version previewing in Calibre, and it's not doing it there. When I look at the file within Sigil, I can see NOTHING that would be causing this weird "page break" behavior - the preview window in Sigil also shows the text flowing on a single "page" with no breaks. Also, the "ncx TOC" that Sigil generates is displaying just fine.

So I just used "MobiUnpack" on that mobi file to see what had happened to my code. And there it is, plain as day - <mbpagebreak></mbpagebreak> after every Chapter heading in the TOC. The only thing "different" between this particular book and the others I've done is I have the inline TOC set up like:

(h2) - Chapter One (for example).
(h3) - Subtitle for Chapter One (that is NOT hyperlinked - just there for descriptive purposes).

Would this be causing things to get confused?! Is this coming from Sigil or Calibre? And which program is changing all my headers into p tags with font sizes and bolds instead?!! Looks like a big mess

So - what on earth could cause this to happen?! And how do I fix it?!

(BTW, please don't tell me there's no need for an inline TOC!! I realize that - but in certain books, I believe it is helpful, and this is one of them...!)
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Old 09-29-2012, 01:52 PM   #2
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My first guess would be that Calibre is doing this. It may be seeing the <h2> and/or <h3> tags and trying to make pagebreaks before them.

Look in the Calibre conversion settings on the "structure detection" tab, and see if you can turn off that behavior. (e.g. modify the xpath expression to ignore h3, or change the "chapter mark" dropdown selection.)

Or, try using kindlegen for the mobi conversion.

Or maybe just use <p> tags for your subtitles.

Last edited by st_albert; 09-29-2012 at 01:55 PM.
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Old 09-29-2012, 05:31 PM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by st_albert
My first guess would be that Calibre is doing this. It may be seeing the <h2> and/or <h3> tags and trying to make pagebreaks before them.
That's the only guess necessary.

@OP: Check your structure detection settings in calibre's conversion dialog. Something in your toc's (x)html is matching the "Detect chapters at" xpath expression and the "Chapter mark" combo is set to "pagebreak." That's where the problem lies.

I've had that fool me so many times I've lost count. It's not Sigil, trust me.

If you have your chapter breaks exactly how you want them in your epub, just disable calibre's chapter detection by changing the "Detect chapters at" xpath expression to "/" (without the quotes of course).
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Old 09-30-2012, 04:00 PM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jackibar View Post
Hi, everyone... I've done several books into Kindle format now with no problems. The "method" I'm using is:

1. Create a "clean" html file manually (yeah, I know - but I'm a programmer at heart!).
2. Import this file into Sigil (I'm on a Mac).
3. Create the chapter breaks, ncx TOC, etc.
4. Open in Calibre and convert to .mobi format.
Why not upload the epub to the KDP, and leave Calibre out of the loop?
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Old 10-05-2012, 07:55 PM   #5
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Originally Posted by Oldpilot View Post
Why not upload the epub to the KDP, and leave Calibre out of the loop?
"Oldpilot"

I suspect the OP doesn't want to create the html toc by hand, and lets Calibre do this for him. Otherwise, I agree, doesn't make a lot of sense. He mentioned the ncx, not a hand-crafted inline TOC, so that's my guess.

Hitch
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Old 10-05-2012, 08:50 PM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch View Post
"Oldpilot"

I suspect the OP doesn't want to create the html toc by hand, and lets Calibre do this for him. Otherwise, I agree, doesn't make a lot of sense. He mentioned the ncx, not a hand-crafted inline TOC, so that's my guess.

Hitch
Just for completeness, the recent betas, .905 and .906 are very good at creating inline HTML TOC's.
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Old 10-05-2012, 09:38 PM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by st_albert View Post
Just for completeness, the recent betas, .905 and .906 are very good at creating inline HTML TOC's.
I admit I've not tried it yet. I'm a wee bit cautious, as we're, also as are you, in a production environment. When my sweetie Ducky tells me it's ready, I'll install it. (Just kidding you, Ol' Moderator Ducks).

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Old 10-05-2012, 10:07 PM   #8
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Originally Posted by Hitch View Post
I admit I've not tried it yet. I'm a wee bit cautious, as we're, also as are you, in a production environment. When my sweetie Ducky tells me it's ready, I'll install it. (Just kidding you, Ol' Moderator Ducks).

Hitch
Well, on Linux (actually Ubuntu Precise) I have not had problems producing a finished product. I expect the same on Debian linux, though in that case I'm going to wait for the 0.6 release. This baby is solid, IMHO!
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Old 10-05-2012, 10:34 PM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch View Post
I admit I've not tried it yet. I'm a wee bit cautious, as we're, also as are you, in a production environment. When my sweetie Ducky tells me it's ready, I'll install it. (Just kidding you, Ol' Moderator Ducks).

Hitch
Try it
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They are pretty plain,
but I believe you can figure something to jazz'm up
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Old 10-05-2012, 10:54 PM   #10
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T
They are pretty plain,
but I believe you can figure something to jazz'm up
Plain inline TOC? I agree, and not the styling I would have decreed. (actually I'd have used a much simpler HTML because, really who cares what it looks like as long as it's functional?) Yet, it seems to work fine in (my main concern) Mobi7 and KF8 (and Apple has not yet complained) so...

And if you don't like the styling, there's always the powerful PCRE engine to fix things relatively easily. Not that I've run into problems yet, w/r to kindlegen conversion for example.
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Old 10-07-2012, 04:55 PM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jackibar View Post
Would this be causing things to get confused?! Is this coming from Sigil or Calibre? And which program is changing all my headers into p tags with font sizes and bolds instead?!! Looks like a big mess

So - what on earth could cause this to happen?! And how do I fix it?!
I also suspect calibre. FWIW we don't do the epub->epub conversion trick in calibre anymore, it makes a lot of changes both to the css and html, and you don't really have fine-grained control over it. For personal use it's fine, but I would advise against it in a production setting.

The wonderful new beta of Sigil has the features needed for splitting and TOC (make sure that your headings are proper h tags, and that things that are not headings are *not*, but it seems you already do that). You can automate most of your workflow with for instance grouped saved searches.

We use calibre for metadata (with the neat Modify Epub plugin kiwidude wrote, that guy is on fire) and storage. You *can* overwrite the epub file in the calibre directory [I know, I know ], this is actually very handy as it'll retain metadata from the existing entry.

Our workflow is currently:

Indesign -> calibre, add metadata.
Sigil: Replace the Indesign-generated CSS with a custom one.
Split files at chapter breaks (we use a dedicated p style as a marker, which we then S/R with the Sigil hr marker), generate toc, de-obfuscate fonts (if embedded fonts are needed), a few saved formatting searches (for "textboxes" and some stylistic flourishes) and validation. Up until recently we did all this with an extremely messy perl script written by myself.
We then give the file a quick page-through in ADE, and run it through ebpucheck since our distributor demands it. I haven't seen an invalid file from this workflow in a long time, though.

With this workflow I currently spend about three minutes to generate a finished epub from an Indesign document when we need to update content. The Sigil beta is amazing, I can't praise the dev team enough. I am also a bit cautious about using a beta in production, but if anything it seems more reliable than 0.5.3, and we inspect our files thoroughly.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jackibar View Post
(BTW, please don't tell me there's no need for an inline TOC!! I realize that - but in certain books, I believe it is helpful, and this is one of them...!)
We also go the epub->mobi route, and you need to have an inline TOC to make a proper mobi since the KindlePreview mobi builder amazingly doesn't generate one from toc.ncx. I don't particularly like inline TOCs myself, but of course you need them for that

You can also easily style the Sigil-generated HTML TOC if you want, since the different divs are nicely classed.
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Old 10-07-2012, 06:15 PM   #12
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My ears were burning

I just wanted to add that if someone wants to come up with an alternative styling for the Sigil generated inline TOC (as a single html page with inline CSS) please feel free to either PM it to me or put as an attachment. We can always consider making it the Sigil default so all users of this feature get the benefit over the current one? Though it wasn't me who added it I'm pretty sure most of the development effort on that particular feature didn't go into the styling .

Perhaps one day Sigil may have some sort of templates feature (a bit like word) where you could choose from a range of "Inline TOC" styles, as well as of course templates for other content page types etc. Just a random thought...
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Old 10-07-2012, 07:40 PM   #13
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We also go the epub->mobi route, and you need to have an inline TOC to make a proper mobi since the KindlePreview mobi builder amazingly doesn't generate one from toc.ncx. I don't particularly like inline TOCs myself, but of course you need them for that
I, too, find inline TOCs an eyesore... unfortunately, they are frequently an indispensible eyesore. If you are converting to MOBI, and have a nested TOC, the embedded TOC in MOBI file produced will only recognize the first level items in your TOC. To get around this you can either forgo nested TOCs in the EPUB book, or you can add an inline TOC, so that reader on a Kindle device will have some way of navigating the full extent of the TOC you've designed, albeit not in an embedded way.
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Old 10-14-2012, 05:56 PM   #14
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I ran into the page-break problem too.

Since you are wrangling html code yourself, add this, to the bottom of the <head> section:

<div style="page-break-before:always;"></div>

I was adding a 'frontispiece' after a title heading, and getting a page break. That fixed it.
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Old 10-19-2012, 10:01 AM   #15
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Wow! I haven't been back on the forums in a while (been working on ebook formatting! - and just now came back to check on responses. Thanks SO much to everyone who responded! I'm learning a lot from all of you.

Okay question - what is "betas, .905 and .906" - I'm assuming these are beta releases of Sigil? If so, where can I find (and try) them?! Sounds very interesting...

Just wanted to also say a huge thank you to the developers - you're doing a VERY good thing here, and I for one really appreciate it
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