I don't know anything about XML and only the barest basics of HTML. I'm an old guy and I'm hoping I don't have to learn them to do what I want. Learning doesn't come easy these days.
Anyway I keep running into books without a table of contents or with a table of contents that doesn't contain links. I've used the setting in the conversion force a table of contents to be created and that often takes care of it, but sometimes it doesn't.
I used Edit Book on an epub file and found in the file for each chapter the word "Chapter" in a book that had no table of contents. I manually added a number at the end of the line, but within the quotes with the word "Chapter", in each file. That seemed to fix it. It's a lot of work but chapters are important to me so it was worthwhile.
I've run into 2 or 3 others since then with problems that aren't solved so easily. For example, a file with this just before the text in each file:
<p class="MsoNormal1"></p></span>*
<p class="MsoNormal1">*</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Chapter
One</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Danny</p>
followed by another <p </p> that has the text of the chapter.
This shows up as a table of contents but there are no links. I found a file called content.opf that seems to list the files and another file called toc.ncx that I'm guessing is some sort of index but maybe not. I have no idea what any of this means.
I realize that the correct solution to my dilemma is to learn xml, more HTML and the format of epub books. I'm a retired programmer, retired almost 2 decades ago, and when I was younger I'd have had no patience with a question like this but I'm asking anyway. What the heck do I do?
I don't mind doing the work and I have enough technical background that I'm not afraid to dig a bit but I really don't know what I'm looking at with this stuff. Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Barry