Is it possible to apply CSS to Sigil generated TOC?

[exaltedwombat]

So I THINK you agree with me? :-) Don't try to be clever if you can't control which device your book will be read on?

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by exaltedwombat

So I THINK you agree with me? :-) Don't try to be clever if you can't control which device your book will be read on?

PDF has the same problems, you may create your book to take advantage of things in PDF 1.7, and/or you can say "best viewed in Adobe Acrobat Reader X".... doesn't stop people from trying to use an earlier version, or a completely different PDF reader (Foxit, mupdf, PDF.js, etc. etc.). You will still have a cutoff point where you say "anything below this version is just not going to work with this book".

Edit: It might be a complete pain/impossible to go from a PDF 1.7 backwards to an earlier version of PDF.

[exaltedwombat]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

You will still have a cutoff point where you say "anything below this version is just not going to work with this book".

Indeed. So you design from the outset with this in mind, and make the cutoff point as low as possible. The job is to convey the information, not to play with the latest-and-greatest toys!

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by exaltedwombat

Indeed. So you design from the outset with this in mind, and make the cutoff point as low as possible. The job is to convey the information, not to play with the latest-and-greatest toys!

A lot of material out there was not designed initially for EPUB:

• It was designed for print
  • Complex layouts
• The book could have been created before format X, Y, or Z even existed.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...e-book_formats
• The book/document could have been designed in an old/obsolete program.
• It was designed as HTML on a website.
  • You could have decades of information ripe for an ebook.
    • Example: I am currently working on a project of ~15 years of daily economics articles.
• Blog posts
  • This is the perfect example of first priority getting the information on your website, secondary/tertiary (or not even on the radar) priority is ebook.
  • These could have potentially been made to take advantage of the more advanced CSS capabilities in Firefox/Chrome/IE...

EPUB2 is not the tip-top priority and the be-all-end-all output format for every single book out there. And to be honest, compared to some of the great stuff you can do with CSS, the CSS capabilities of ADE are SEVERELY lacking.

In the case of the original poster, CSS counters have worked well for all of these years with new revisions of the guides... in every other format the company needs (I assume PDF/HTML at least). The tool they use allows them to easily add/remove questions as needed, and everything gets auto-renumbered in less than a second. Once you start hard-coding, you can't go back.

You would not toss out an entire workflow + YEARS of manhours.... just to maybe appease the quirks of having to hard-code numbers into a temporary ebook format (in this case EPUB2) or the quirks of an optional tool (in this case, Sigil).

There is such a thing as momentum of backlogs and in-place workflows.......... sure, you can easily say "just design from the outset with this in mind", but that is in many cases not possible (or more importantly, would be cost-prohibitive).

Originally Posted by exaltedwombat

Indeed. So you design from the outset with this in mind, and make the cutoff point as low as possible. The job is to convey the information, not to play with the latest-and-greatest toys!

You can stick with your "Cybook Gen 1" (*insert any old ereader*) reading pure .txt documents. Ok ok, I will grant you bold/italics. Any more than that would be too advanced for books! Can't go playing with the latest-and-greatest!

[exaltedwombat]

Yes, some source material will need re-formatting if you want to publish to the current eBook market. There are several people here who will do the job for a moderate price. You'll find it easy to construct scenarios where this will be particularly troublesome. We can charge more for converting these!

You seem to be getting very excited over this rather obvious fact :-)

[phossler]

@Tex2002ans

Edit: I just thought of this potential solution. Since you already have well marked HTML, but are only missing the auto-generated #s. Would it be possible to have Sigil carry you most of the way? You can have Sigil auto-generate a toc.ncx, you can then come up with some sort of script to manually add in numbers to each navpoint. Code samples of everything could potentially help us iron out problems (a typical chapter, your HTML TOC, your CSS, the toc.ncx, ...)!

File under 'Blue Skys' -- I often thought that a 'post processor' plug in or standalone program would / could / should be able to handle a lot of the 'not in epub2' questions.

Kind of like MS Word's Bookmarks

For example in the epub you could have what the epub sees as just text

{{SomeVariableName=Cats And Dogs}} to 'store'


and

{{=SomeVariableName}} to have the postprocessor replace it with Cats And Dogs at that point in the epub


CSS counters only work within a html file (I learned that here)

You could do simple epub level math


{{ChapterNum=1}} to 'store' a starting value

and

{{ChapterNum+1}} to increment and update to call accross multiple html files

Generating a SIgil TOC after running the PP would now pick up the replaced text

Oh, well

Paul