[MacEachaidh]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I'm not sure this is helpful, as I cannot see what you have in front of you, but do the individual xhtml files appear in the order in which they are supposed to appear in the book when you look at them in the book browser pane?

Hi Hitch, thanks for your reply. Yes, they do.

Originally Posted by Hitch

In other words, do they look like this:

--Cover
--Chap 1
--Chap 2
--Chap 3a
--Chap 3b
--Chapt 4
blahblah
--Chap 11

Yes, exactly. In Sigil, in the book browser pane, they don't appear out of order at all. And if I open each section in the View window to the right, the text appears to be in correct order. It's only when I save the ePub file and copy it onto my Story, that the text displays out of order.

Originally Posted by Dave_S

According to the Sigil manual the OPF is required, and logically, how can the reader program know how to order the contents without it? Since Sigil does not display the OPF file as a separate entity, you will need to do like JSWolf said, and edit it with a text editor. Sigil puts it in the OEBPS folder inside the EPUB.

G'day Dave, and thanks. Well, that's a bit of a bummer. One reason I was using Sigil was an attempt to not have to deconstruct the ePub file, since I've read there can be real problems if it's not put back together correctly and in precisely the correct order.

Originally Posted by Valloric

Your Reading System will display the XHTML files in the order they are listed in the Book Browser in Sigil. Do note that the numbers in the filenames given to the newly created sections after splitting are arbitrary and do not represent the order of the chapters in your book.

You don't need to edit the OPF directly, just open the epub in Sigil and reorder the XHTML files in the Book Browser to the order of your liking (click a file and drag it up and down to a new position).

Hey Valloric, thanks for your input. Yeah, I assumed Sigil was ordering the pieces in the compiled ePub file as they appear in the browser, but it doesn't seem to be, and I'm not sure why. As I said, they don't appear out of order in the browser window, so there doesn't appear to be any re-ordering to be done.

I figured the temporary names Sigil gave new splits were just working names. I noticed, for instance, I might get up to section0009 (say), would rename the sections, then "save as" the file, and go back in to do more splits, and it would start again at section0001. So I gathered that was just the working convention of the app, which is quite logical.

Could it have anything to do with the splits not being sequential? By which I mean, doing a split later in a document, and then one earlier before that split? I notice Sigil seems to like things being done in a consecutive order - not unreasonable, it just requires more careful planning on my part. And I noticed if I place my cursor incorrectly, and so split a file in the wrong place, Sigil doesn't allow me to undo it, so I figured it's writing the changes somewhere else in addition to the files we can say. (I'm guessing, from this thread, it's the OPF, which I knew very little about before starting to use Sigil.) Could the records there be written in chronological order, but out of sequential order in the document (if you understand what I mean), so later cuts earlier in the text throw things out of whack?

I didn't want to deconstruct the ePub and start editing its components by hand, as I said (chiefly for lack of knowledge on my part), but maybe that's what I'll need to do?