[hobnail]

Originally Posted by theducks

<h2 class-"whatever" title="the real words for the TOC">

A little REGEXfoo and you can build the title= bit

I think this is similar to what I had used. But it's been years and I've forgotten. There's a chapter numbering plugin for Sigil that I used to generate the "Chapter One" etc. with h1 tags, and then below that I think I had an h2 tag with the descriptive name. Then I used a regex to convert that to something like

<h2>Chapter One <span>Descriptive Title</span></h2>

In my CSS file I had

h2 span, h3 span {
    display: block;
    font-size: larger;
    font-style: italic;
    font-variant: normal;
    font-weight: bold;
    margin-top: 1.25em
     }

The "trick" is that display:block; the above CSS applies to the span inside the h2, not the h2. The display:block puts on a separate line what's inside the span.

If you look for the book Batwing Bowles by Dane Coolidge here in the mobileread library you can see the final result. Both the TOC and the chapter first pages.