TOC formatting

[canine]

Hi all,

I have been clearing up the html mess produced by Scrivener in my ePub 3 file.

A staggering amount of spurious code - too much to cover here.

All has been going well with Sigil.

I have encountered an issue with my TOC. I had generated it in Sigil - results were OK.

I further edited my document and regenerated the TOC - it now looks horrible. The TOC now shows each entry with either a number, or next level with letters or multiple letters e.g aa, ab, ac - looks awful. The first time I generated the TOC - it just showed the headings - now I have this mess of ugly formatted lists.

How do I get rid of all the numbering and letters in the TOC? I just want the headings showing (this had been the case - no idea why Sigil has created such an ugly mess.

Cheers,

Mike

[KevinH]

Sigil only ever builds its toc from the contents of the heading tags h1, h2, h3, etc.
So whatever you have done has changed the contents of those tags in some way. If you want to override a heading tag you can set a different string in that tag's title attribute. This can be made easier using the TOC Editor.

Without specific examples of changes to those tags and to the resulting toc, there is no way to help.

[roland1]

I'm just learning SIGIL so I encountered that issue as well.

You have to go to the tools/table of contents/generate table of contents interface.

And there you have to uncheck the "show TOC ....only" box and it will give you an overview of what's been checked and what hasn't. This should give you an idea of what you need to uncheck to clean up your mess.

It takes a while to figure out what's going on with SIGIL. Like most programs, it has a mind of its own. I've been at it for 12 days. Getting used to it.

Also, I only use H1 headings for my TOC. If you were to add subheadings, I would go with H2. In that way, you can also use the select menu to focus only on those two types of tags. Again, you have to get used to looking at SIGIL and what it's trying to do.

This is based on my experience. Hence, it's not SIGIL law.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by canine

[...] I further edited my document and regenerated the TOC - it now looks horrible. The TOC now shows each entry with either a number, or next level with letters or multiple letters e.g aa, ab, ac - looks awful. The first time I generated the TOC - it just showed the headings - now I have this mess of ugly formatted lists.

Can you take a screenshot of this?

Originally Posted by canine

I have been clearing up the html mess produced by Scrivener in my ePub 3 file.

I'm assuming this Scrivener mess infected everything else in the book too.

Sigil's Tools > Table of Contents > Table of Contents generates based on your <h1> -> <h6> tags.

<h1>Part 1</h1>

<h2>Chapter 1. The Beginning</h2>

<h3>Section 1: Waking Up</h3>

[...]

<h1>Part 2</h1>

would create a TOC with:

- Part 1
-- Chapter 1. The Beginning
--- Section 1: Waking Up
- Part 2

Sigil doesn't add any extra numbers or letters nonsense.

Originally Posted by KevinH

Sigil only ever builds its toc from the contents of the heading tags h1, h2, h3, etc.
So whatever you have done has changed the contents of those tags in some way. If you want to override a heading tag you can set a different string in that tag's title attribute. This can be made easier using the TOC Editor.

Yes, like KevinH says, you can manually override what gets written in Sigil's TOC by using title:

<h1 title="P1">Part 1</h1>

which would show up in the TOC as:

- P1

... but it sounds like you have some serious underlying Scrivener issues that have to be dealt with first.

[hobnail]

Expanding on what tex2002ans said, as another example, in the TOC I like to have the word Chapter in front of the chapter's number then a big dash then the chapter's title. So when it's all done my h2 tags look like the following

    <h2 title="Chapter One — The place of Bruntisfield">One <span>The place of Bruntisfield</span></h2>

Then in the book there is no word Chapter, just the One. (For some reason it looks sort of bare not having the word Chapter in the TOC but in the book it seems redundant given that it's at the top of the page at the start of the chapter.) Then a blank line, then the chapter title. Moving the chapter title to its own line is done with some css on the span, specifically the display:block

h2 span, h1 span {
    display: block;
    font-size: larger;
    font-style: italic;
    /* overrides small-caps in 2nd .css file */
    font-variant: normal;
    font-weight: bold;
    margin-top: 1.25em;
}

I have a bunch of search and replaces in sigil's Saved Searches that reformat the chapter titles from what I originally had, h2 contains the chapter number and h3 contains the chapter title.

[canine]

Thank you all.

I dealt with it by stripping out any <ol> and </ol> tags.

Net result - a very nice TOC.

Thanks for everyone's ideas.

Cheers,

Mike

[DiapDealer]

Note that the NAV document in an Epub 3 has certain specifications it needs to follow. Stripping out the ordered list tags may not be the best answer in this case.

Sigil hides the numbering in its automatically generated nav.xhtml using css. namely:

ol {
    list-style-type: none;
}

From your original comments, it sounds to me as if you may have inadvertently deleted either the link to the NAV's css, or deleted some inline styling that Scrivener output.