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RootlessAgrarian · 02-12-2010, 04:52 PM

As a clueless n00b I have been wandering about in Google-land trying to find out how to generate a working TOC for an epub doc. I have a readable epub doc with many sections and chapters and would really like a decent TOC for navigation.

In my wanderings I read that Sigil should recognise the H1 and H2 tags as hierarchical chapter/section markers and generate a correct toc.ncx (I sure wouldn't want to construct one by hand). So I painstakingly edited over 60 .xhtml files by hand to h1-ify and h2-ify the titles of sections and subsections of the book. Ugh.

I re-epubbed the dir (many thanks to the MR member who contributed the neat little applescript for zipping up a dir into proper epub format!) and read the resulting epub with Sigil. To my hair-tearing frustration it did not even read the entire document, but stopped after the first section. No error message, nothing. And the TOC of course contains only the structure up to that first section.

I'm beginning to have a real hate/hate relationship with Sigil -- it's slow as molasses to respond to text edits and I have not yet seen any way in which it helpfully automates any epub editing task. But maybe I need to get to know it better. In any case -- what causes Sigil to stop reading an epub one section into the doc? Is there any cmd line tool for generating a correct toc.ncx once I have h1 and h2 tags in the xhtml content files?

And btw, I introduced "chapter breaks" in Sigil while doing some wysi editing of the book, to get clean page breaks between subsections. Could this be mucking up the TOC recognition?

Calibre can read/view this epub in its entirety but with no TOC at all (more hair tearing) -- why does it "see" the doc differently from Sigil?

Anyway, I am baffled and discouraged, and looking hopefully for a cmd-line or other tool that will auto-generate toc.ncx from xhtml source, so I don't have to write my own :-)

Am I alone in finding Sigil rather opaque, feature-poor, and confusing? (And why is the "Preferences" menu option disabled, while I'm griping?)

02-12-2010, 04:52 PM	#1
RootlessAgrarian Enthusiast Posts: 48 Karma: 62 Join Date: Jan 2010 Device: HANLIN V3	New to Sigil, frustrated: bad TOC As a clueless n00b I have been wandering about in Google-land trying to find out how to generate a working TOC for an epub doc. I have a readable epub doc with many sections and chapters and would really like a decent TOC for navigation. In my wanderings I read that Sigil should recognise the H1 and H2 tags as hierarchical chapter/section markers and generate a correct toc.ncx (I sure wouldn't want to construct one by hand). So I painstakingly edited over 60 .xhtml files by hand to h1-ify and h2-ify the titles of sections and subsections of the book. Ugh. I re-epubbed the dir (many thanks to the MR member who contributed the neat little applescript for zipping up a dir into proper epub format!) and read the resulting epub with Sigil. To my hair-tearing frustration it did not even read the entire document, but stopped after the first section. No error message, nothing. And the TOC of course contains only the structure up to that first section. I'm beginning to have a real hate/hate relationship with Sigil -- it's slow as molasses to respond to text edits and I have not yet seen any way in which it helpfully automates any epub editing task. But maybe I need to get to know it better. In any case -- what causes Sigil to stop reading an epub one section into the doc? Is there any cmd line tool for generating a correct toc.ncx once I have h1 and h2 tags in the xhtml content files? And btw, I introduced "chapter breaks" in Sigil while doing some wysi editing of the book, to get clean page breaks between subsections. Could this be mucking up the TOC recognition? Calibre can read/view this epub in its entirety but with no TOC at all (more hair tearing) -- why does it "see" the doc differently from Sigil? Anyway, I am baffled and discouraged, and looking hopefully for a cmd-line or other tool that will auto-generate toc.ncx from xhtml source, so I don't have to write my own :-) Am I alone in finding Sigil rather opaque, feature-poor, and confusing? (And why is the "Preferences" menu option disabled, while I'm griping?)