Can't tell if this is a bad conversion or a bad source file.

[Cactus Chef]

I purchased a couple fantasy anthology books from Amazon. Surprisingly, they showed up in my library as a MOBI rather than an AZW3 after DeDRM imported them. They seem to work well enough on the Kindle itself (there are chapter markers, table of contents, time remaining, etc), but the converted EPUB had none of these things evident when I transferred it to my Kobo.

I've opened the MOBI file in Foliate, and I can still see a TOC, but this disappears when I convert it to EPUB--the resulting EPUB's toc.ncx only has a title marker in it.

In looking at the raw HTML, I'm finding more weirdness. I can't find any header tags, for one thing, and even more bizarre, the core body of each chapter (each a standalone short-story or novella) is basically a single line!

I've attached both a screenshot of the MOBI file open in Foliate, showing the TOC nav, as well as a scrambled version of the EPUB (I can't run the MOBI itself through Calibre's ScrambleEbook tool).

Looking for suggestions on how best to clean this up. The whole text being on one line is kinda weird, but as long as it renders okay on the device, I don't care too much. At the very least I just want:

• chapter markers
• a working table of contents

so that I can easily hop between stories. This text had a "sequel" work with the same problems, so whatever solution I come up with for the first I can also apply to the second.

Thanks in advance!

[retiredbiker]

The epub does indeed have only one entry in the TOC, which may be from some conversion settings?? Try converting it with bog-standard defaults.

But its dead easy to fix the epub: Use the TOC editor, which you can get to from the Editor or (I think) the main gui window (You might have to add it to the menu bar...). Each chapter is a file in the epub, so erase the one entry it has, and rebuild the TOC "From files". You might want to fiddle the default chapter names, can't tell from the scrambled file, but that will make a complete TOC.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Cactus Chef

Looking for suggestions on how best to clean this up.

Apparently, the chapter headings have been formatted as blockquotes.

To get a working TOC:

• Open the book in Calibre Editor.
• Replace all occurences of blockquote with h3.
• Select Tools > Table of Contents > Edit Table of Contents.
• Select Generate ToC from major headings.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Apparently, the chapter headings have been formatted as blockquotes.

To get a working TOC:

• Open the book in Calibre Editor.
• Replace all occurences of blockquote with h3.
• Select Tools > Table of Contents > Edit Table of Contents.
• Select Generate ToC from major headings.

Why do you need to generate the ToC? It's already been edited according to your directions. Also, generating would do away with the edited ToC with the generated ToC.

[Cactus Chef]

Thanks for the advice. Generating a TOC from major headings (or headings at all) did not seem to work, but I used the option "Generate TOC from files", and that gave me something I could work with, after I removed some entries (all of the author blurbs were in standalone files). The "beautify HTML" option also un-flattened all of the core text and made it more readable.

Once I did those, the resulting EPUBs had a working ToC, and seemingly chapter markers as well: my Kobo detected chapters at each ToC point. Both books are looking great now.