[Old Thread] Table of contents forced to end not start of .mobi

[irishpolyglot]

I absolutely love Calibre! It's been simplifying my life and making my Kindle infinitely more useful I've been sharing it with everyone!

The interface is very user friendly, but there is one minor issue I've run into. I've rendered a book I wrote as a mobi and it shows up great - but the Table of Contents is forced to the END. It's fully clickable and working lovely (I associated chapter starts with html headers), but I'd like this at the START.

The source is an html, output profile is Kindle, result is same if I force or don't force use of auto-generated TOC.

It's a minor thing, I know in the Kindle when I press menu there is an option to see the table of contents, so it goes right to that, but if it were possible I'd like this at the beginning

Keep up the great work!

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by irishpolyglot

I've rendered a book I wrote as a mobi and it shows up great - but the Table of Contents is forced to the END. It's fully clickable and working lovely (I associated chapter starts with html headers), but I'd like this at the START.

I noticed that, with some books, but I assumed it was that way in the source file.

in fact I think I now have some on my kindle with toc both at start and at end.

I agree that at-end is useless, most times you don't even know it's there until you read the last page of the story.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by cybmole

I agree that at-end is useless, most times you don't even know it's there until you read the last page of the story.

I don't have a Kindle so maybe the two of you can enlighten me. Isn't there a menu or button driven way to access the Kindle's TOC without going to the inline TOC? On my Sony if the TOC is setup correctly it is displayed via menus built into the reader and using any inline TOC is optional.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by cybmole

I noticed that, with some books, but I assumed it was that way in the source file.

in fact I think I now have some on my kindle with toc both at start and at end.

I agree that at-end is useless, most times you don't even know it's there until you read the last page of the story.

Some books bury a small link to the in_line TOC on the titlepage.
The TOC is physically at the end (I notice Baen is doing this)
ADE equipped readers can use the NCX file directly (if anyone bothered to populate the entries) My reader has a button AND a (while reading) menu item: Catalog . Most of my books do not have an "inline TOC"

[ryy8]

(replying to an old thread, because this is the first hit that came up on Google and the question wasn't really answered).

This is answered in the Calibre FAQ: What’s the deal with Table of Contents in MOBI files?

The first thing to realize is that most ebooks have two tables of contents. One is the traditional Table of Contents, like the TOC you find in paper books. This Table of Contents is part of the main document flow and can be styled however you like. This TOC is called the content TOC.

Then there is the metadata TOC. A metadata TOC is a TOC that is not part of the book text and is typically accessed by some special button on a reader. For example, in the calibre viewer, you use the Show Table of Contents button to see this TOC. This TOC cannot be styled by the book creator. How it is represented is up to the viewer program.

In the MOBI format, the situation is a little confused. This is because the MOBI format, alone amongst mainstream ebook formats, does not have decent support for a metadata TOC. A MOBI book simulates the presence of a metadata TOC by putting an extra content TOC at the end of the book. When you click Goto Table of Contents on your Kindle, it is to this extra content TOC that the Kindle takes you.

Now it might well seem to you that the MOBI book has two identical TOCs. Remember that one is semantically a content TOC and the other is a metadata TOC, even though both might have exactly the same entries and look the same. One can be accessed directly from the Kindle’s menus, the other cannot.

When converting to MOBI, calibre detects the metadata TOC in the input document and generates an end-of-file TOC in the output MOBI file. You can turn this off by an option in the MOBI Output settings. You cannot control where this generated TOC will go. Remember this TOC is semantically a metadata TOC, in any format other than MOBI it cannot not be part of the text. The fact that it is part of the text in MOBI is an accident caused by the limitations of MOBI. If you want a TOC at a particular location in your document text, create one by hand.

If you have a hand edited TOC in the input document, you can use the TOC detection options in calibre to automatically generate the metadata TOC from it. See the conversion section of the User Manual for more details on how to use these options.

Finally, I encourage you to ditch the content TOC and only have a metadata TOC in your ebooks. Metadata TOCs will give the people reading your ebooks a much superior navigation experience (except on the Kindle, where they are essentially the same as a content TOC).