Tools for Editing Kindle .mobi Files?

[Jesse Chisholm]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

H* tags always trigger a page-break-before on the Kindle. That's not always desirable. Like chapter numbers with a (same-sized) chapter name beneath it. Nobody wants a pagebreak in between those two items, so they use a P tag with CSS to simulate a header.

I wish chapter headers were more consistently tagged, but I also understand why they're oftentimes not.

The workaround for this is, naturally:
<h1>ChapterNumber<br>Chapter Name</h1>

But there will be cases (like the TOC) where that doesn't look quite right either.

UPDATE: I see I'm responding to a much older post that I originally thought I was. Nevermind!

-Jesse

[Small Elephant]

Hi
I was frustrated not having a working Table Of Contents for my e-ink Kindle books and after reading your posts I now know how to do it.

In Calibre I convert them to Epub.
In Sigil I create TOC.
In Calibre I convert to MOBI.

Thank you so much for the information.

I have a question though. Is there any way to automatically remove the paragraph following all the page numbers? As it is now, the page number shows up in the middle of the text followed by a new paragraph with the name of the author or chapter and then the book continues on yet another new paragraph. It would be nice to only see the page number followed by a space and then continuing text. I know how to manually find and replace the paragraphs in Sigil. It takes a long time and in some books the text following the page numbers is different from chapter to chapter therefore I have to go into all chapters and manually do it.

example:
thought he 79</p>

<p class="calibre2">MILTON ERICKSON</p>

<p class="calibre2">would try something different.

[Klip]

Originally Posted by jswinden

I hate that so many publishers/authors build their eBooks without using the basic standard HTML tags. Instead of using H1, H2, H3 many use a P tag with a gosh-awful CSS class call out. HELLO, that makes autocreation of TOCs a no go!! I personally like a minimalist approach to CSS within eBooks. If I have to modify a book, the first thing I do is strip out all the garbage from the CSS file. No need to remove the CSS classes and what not from each HTML file as it will be ignored if it cannot be found in the CSS file. Next I make sure each chapter/section heading has an H1 or H2 tag. If it is not to much work I also make sure all subheadings have a heading tag as well. It usually isn't too time consuming, but some publishers seem to use a different class for every subheading (within the same level) making a search replace impossible. Idiots!

InDesign spits out HTML like that - with classes instead of simple h1, h2 etc. Not sure if other software does too. Very irritating.

[Tagbert]

Actually, the best way to format that chapter heading would be like this:

<h1><span class="chapternum">ChapterNumber </span>Chapter Name</h1>

then in the css you would have
.chapternum{display:block;}

That way, it should just display normally in a TOC with no line breaks. The css "display" setting forces a line break after that element.