Quote:
Originally Posted by Tulpana
Hitch, thank you SO much. First, I experimented with the code part and just stuck h1 and /h1 tags in the code, and--here's the really (I mean really) scary part. After having successfully generated, for the first time, a TOC, Calibre failed to save it, and the EPUB file not only made Calibre crash but I got an error message about some "Python." Still not the worst.The entire EPUB vanished from my hard drive. I swear by Jove, this is true. If I had not fortuitously copied the un-TOC-ed .EPUB to my Nook, I'd have defenestrated myself. I haven't had something this weird happen since Windows 95.
To get to the point of my citation-- Yes, I believed that doing exactly what you say would/should have generated a TOC. It did not. I found but failed to bookmark a site by someone who seemed to have more HTML knowledge than I (not a glowing recommendation, of course) that stated outright that Sigil will not generate TOC's for WYSIWIG users.
So I've been copying and pasting header format (again, you're right about font style and format), adding <h1> and </h1> to the ends of that line, and...hopefully, when I do this all again, my laptop will not levitate or develop a force field or vanish under a cloaking device.  |
I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say, "Calibre failed to save it;" are you "tweaking" an ePUB in Calibre with Sigil?
Instead of working in Sigil
directly?
Don't confuse a toc.ncx--which is what is used to navigate in Nook--with an html toc (aka, "an inline toc"), which is required for Apple and for Amazon, as well as a handful of other retailers. You'll have to make a toc by HAND, the old-fashioned way (you type text, you make it into a link, pointing to where you want to go), and from there, you set your GUIDE items so that Amazon and Apple can "use" your hand-crafted TOC[*]. Your alternative is to use Calibre to take a final ePUB and either a) convert ePUB->ePUB to get it to make an inline TOC for you, or, b) convert ePUB-->MOBI so that you get a book that will work on Amazon. Yes, this means that the MOBI and the Apple ePUB have "two" tables of content--an ncx, the "invisible" toc--not "typed" on a page, for lack of a better explanation, and the "typed" TOC, which is typed like any other chapter or section or acknowledgements, etc., and then linked, in the code, to the relevant chapter heading or file (save yourself some brain-damage--in the html toc, just link to the relevant html file).
[*]This requires some, not a lot, of html.
n.b.--having said that, I have to remind everyone here that
Amazon is still rejecting Calibre-made mobi's, but I don't know if you're creating a book for yourself or for sale. If you're just making a book for yourself, this doesn't matter.
I would strenuously recommend that you take some of the locally-available tutorials on making ePUBs, and try
Liz Castro's most excellent book for ePUB Beginners, "ePUB: Straight to the Point," which you can find at Apple, Nook and Amazon, or on her website, (Pigs Gourds and Wikis) in PDF, I believe, if you want it that way. Worth every penny--I buy and provide a copy to every new employee we get here, even those that think that they already know how to make ePUBs. You can ignore practically the entire first half (sorry, Liz!), if you don't use InDesign, but her second half is worth it.
Hope that helps.
Hitch