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lindsayw · 03-25-2011, 10:04 PM

I have successfully converted all 9 of my own novels into html (because I have plenty of experience making web-pages), made a css stylesheet to create my personal preferences for layout and presentation, using strict xhtml... all good, and I'm very happy with the results in either ePub or MOBI formats.

EXCEPT: On some books (well, ok, on ONE book so far), the Reader gets to the end of Chapter #38 (the end of the book), then moves on to a previous chapter. Huh? I have triple-checked all the "Previous-Index-Next" links embedded in the chapter files and they are all perfect... there seems no reason why the Reader should get to the end of Name-38.html, then display Name-06.html as the "next" chapter!!
I am using Anthemion eCub to compile the ePub file from the source html files, then Sigil to check the visual presentation and edit the toc-ncx file, and finally Calibre to "tweak" the ePub, add ISBN details, modify the Contents.opf file to point to an inline TOC... that all works great. One possible cause of my problem is that I sometimes do NOT include the final chapter as a "NavPoint" in the toc.ncx file, since sometimes that final chapter is more like an Epilogue. There are also extra files in the book, such as "about the author", "synopsis" or others, and these are not strictly part of the story, yet I don't know how to label them as such. Access to these pages should really be only from the TOC.

Is there an industry convention that inserting something like an <a id="end" /> tag at the end of the last chapter would be recognized by ebook compilers such as eCub? I presume that this would imply also using an <a id="start" /> tag at the beginning as well... Has anyone had similar problems?

03-25-2011, 10:04 PM	#1
lindsayw Author from pBook days Posts: 49 Karma: 10782 Join Date: Mar 2011 Location: Australia Device: Kindle-3-Keyboard; 8" Android Tablet	Definitive END tag? I have successfully converted all 9 of my own novels into html (because I have plenty of experience making web-pages), made a css stylesheet to create my personal preferences for layout and presentation, using strict xhtml... all good, and I'm very happy with the results in either ePub or MOBI formats. EXCEPT: On some books (well, ok, on ONE book so far), the Reader gets to the end of Chapter #38 (the end of the book), then moves on to a previous chapter. Huh? I have triple-checked all the "Previous-Index-Next" links embedded in the chapter files and they are all perfect... there seems no reason why the Reader should get to the end of Name-38.html, then display Name-06.html as the "next" chapter!! I am using Anthemion eCub to compile the ePub file from the source html files, then Sigil to check the visual presentation and edit the toc-ncx file, and finally Calibre to "tweak" the ePub, add ISBN details, modify the Contents.opf file to point to an inline TOC... that all works great. One possible cause of my problem is that I sometimes do NOT include the final chapter as a "NavPoint" in the toc.ncx file, since sometimes that final chapter is more like an Epilogue. There are also extra files in the book, such as "about the author", "synopsis" or others, and these are not strictly part of the story, yet I don't know how to label them as such. Access to these pages should really be only from the TOC. Is there an industry convention that inserting something like an <a id="end" /> tag at the end of the last chapter would be recognized by ebook compilers such as eCub? I presume that this would imply also using an <a id="start" /> tag at the beginning as well... Has anyone had similar problems?