Is there a way to prevent Calibre adding to the TOC upon conversion?

[PatNY]

I have an epub file whose structure and metadata TOC is fine. However I wanted to run it through a Calibre epub-to-epub conversion merely to get the cover to show properly on my Touch (by checking "No SVG cover" in conversion settings). Problem is, no matter what setting I used, I couldn't prevent Calibre from adding items to the TOC.ncx file. (I examined it in pdfxml inspector to double check.)

I tried it with default settings except that I had "none" set for "chapter mark" as I don't want any additional file splits.

I tried it with "Do not add detected chapters to the Table of Contents" checked and that didn't work either.

Calibre always added these additional TOC items which happen to be literally hundreds of page numbers.

So is there some tweak or hidden setting to use so a conversion won't add to the TOC.ncx file?

Alternately, is there a way to set the cover of the epub file so the book doesn't show a blank page in the beginning on the device without doing a conversion?

I'm stumped.

[ldolse]

You may want to open a bug with that epub. Creating hundreds of TOC items sounds a bit odd.

The simpler solution to your problem would be to use Sigil though. Just open up the epub there and delete the blank cover page.

[kovidgoyal]

Reduce the number of links added to TOC to zero

[PatNY]

Kovid, I put the numeral zero in the box but it made no difference. The extra entries still showed up.

The odd thing is that these extra entries don't show up in the TOC window in Calibre's reader but they show up on my Touch. And I know they were added in upon the conversion as I checked the toc.ncx file both before and after the conversion using pdfxml inspector. The good thing is that I was able to delete these extra entries using pdfxml inspector but it's not the most convenient tool to use.

Any other suggestions?

[PatNY]

Originally Posted by ldolse

The simpler solution to your problem would be to use Sigil though. Just open up the epub there and delete the blank cover page.

Sigil does not support toc.ncx files. The TOC is destroyed when you open and save an epub in Sigil that contains such a file. I think the developer is planning to add support for it later.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by PatNY

Sigil does not support toc.ncx files. The TOC is destroyed when you open and save an epub in Sigil that contains such a file. I think the developer is planning to add support for it later.

Another option for your consideration. For simple EPUB tweaking, I find the little free utility discussed/offered on the Atlantis WP blog quite useful. You can tweak most of the epub constituent parts, including toc.ncx, in-situ using your favourite text editor, without destroying anything.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by PatNY

Sigil does not support toc.ncx files. The TOC is destroyed when you open and save an epub in Sigil that contains such a file. I think the developer is planning to add support for it later.

I noticed this. I ran across some epubs that are like the OPs results. I don't see any of the extra entries in calibre's viewer until I open and save the epub with Sigil. I'm not interested enough to figure out why this happens. Most of the time the TOC is not affected by a epub conversion.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Another option for your consideration. For simple EPUB tweaking, I find the little free utility discussed/offered on the Atlantis WP blog quite useful. You can tweak most of the epub constituent parts, including toc.ncx, in-situ using your favourite text editor, without destroying anything.

This is a seriously helpful utility. It lets me use VIM's regular expressions to fix no end of formatting problems without any unpleasant side effects. Thank you for pointing it out.

[PatNY]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

I noticed this. I ran across some epubs that are like the OPs results. I don't see any of the extra entries in calibre's viewer until I open and save the epub with Sigil.

Yes, in some instances Sigil will mess up a completely good TOC and add in its own items, which is why you can't use it all the time (if you value the existing TOC). But just to be clear, this is not the main issue here. In my case the extra items were added into the TOC upon a simple Calibre conversion.

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Another option for your consideration. For simple EPUB tweaking, I find the little free utility discussed/offered on the Atlantis WP blog quite useful.

Thanks, jackie. Seems to be a very useful utility and I was able to use it to edit the TOC.ncx file.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

For simple EPUB tweaking, I find the little free utility discussed/offered on the Atlantis WP blog quite useful.

Thanks! Just the info about the structure of an EPUB was valuable. I didn't realize file order and compression were as critical as they are.

[jackie_w]

@chaley, PatNY, Starson17... Well I'm very glad to have been the messenger, but the real thanks should go to member awp for providing the little gem that is epub-tweak.

[jpaulm]

Originally Posted by PatNY

... But just to be clear, this is not the main issue here. In my case the extra items were added into the TOC upon a simple Calibre conversion.....

I am having the same problem of having extra entries added to my TOC by Calibre. As Jackie_w suggested in answer to an earlier question, I don't even use Sigil. I thought checking "Do not add detected chapters to the Table of Contents" would fix this, but no luck! Is this a bug in Calibre? TIA

[DoctorOhh]

First, in the future consider opening a new thread. The thread you reopened is discussing calibre as it existed 30 versions ago.

Originally Posted by jpaulm

I thought checking "Do not add detected chapters to the Table of Contents" would fix this, but no luck! Is this a bug in Calibre? TIA

In addition to checking Do not add detected chapters to the Table of Contents try changing the Number of links to add to Table of Contents to zero?

[jpaulm]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

First, in the future consider opening a new thread. The thread you reopened is discussing calibre as it existed 30 versions ago.

In addition to checking Do not add detected chapters to the Table of Contents try changing the Number of links to add to Table of Contents to zero?

a) If so, how come we have the same problem - and other posts are quite recent too... I can open a new thread if you think that will get more attention. BTW The version I am using is 0.7.46.

b) Yes, I set the number of links to 0 but I still got the chapters added. I see this bug was reported 2 years ago, but for some reason it was cancelled - so why are we still getting this problem?

I can delete them by hand in toc.ncx, but I'll have to do this every time I change something...

[jackie_w]

@jpaulm,

When doing your second epub to epub conversion what do you have in the Convert - StructureDetection - Detect Chapters at box?

I try to avoid epub to epub conversions just in case I get the TOC messed up. If I do have to do one I set the above box to a single forward slash, / - I also set all the TOC boxes on the Convert - TOC page to blank. I don't know whether this is guaranteed to work but you could give it a try.

Edit: Oh and make sure Convert - TOC - Force use of auto-generated TOC is unchecked.

Looking at a couple of different approaches to your cover problem:

• If your pre-conversion epub was also created by calibre then merely re-sending the epub to the reader may update the cover as part of the send. Whether it works depends on how the cover is defined inside the epub, but calibre does its best to make sure the cover is the current calibre one.
  
• I don't think you mentioned which reader you have but if it's a Sony PRS-x50 there are ways to make sure the cover thumbnails on the reader match the current calibre versions. It may not matter as much to you what the cover looks like on page 1 of the epub if your Sony bookshelf cover thumbnail is correct.