Chapters in books

[JCSullivan]

Many of us have written about the need for bookmarks and being able to move around in a book.

I was reading the Calibre! Quick Start Guide yesterday and the way it is setup with Chapters is great to move throughout the book as are all the other epubs downloaded. The only bookmark you need is the one where you close the book.

So, does anyone have sufficient knowledge or can point me into the direction of how to insert Chapters in an epub.

Thanks

[SeptemberWasp]

I needed to insert chapters in my friends writing that I'm currently reading and gave to me in doc format.

I played around with a program called Sigil for inserting chapters in epubs and epub manipulation in general.

In the end I found that calibre does a decent job detecting chapters based on using header style "thing" within word in the document. I simply went through the docs and made the chapter names "heading 1" within Word, saved to RTF, converted via calibre and presto.

Thats all I got, its not much, maybe a decent point in a semi-decent direction.

[SensualPoet]

Properly formatted commercial books should not need this step. Properly made user-generated books, ditto -- probably more on mobileread are good to go.

Calibre is not an editing platform; it's for conversions. So, yes, it's helpful when you are creating your own books in Word -- but this isn't a step anyone should have to do (and that's a source thing, not a Kobo thing).

Are you asking for multiple bookmarks in the same book? I am having no trouble with one bookmark per book (simultaneous bookmarks on the device but one per book).

[JCSullivan]

Originally Posted by SeptemberWasp

I needed to insert chapters in my friends writing that I'm currently reading and gave to me in doc format.

I played around with a program called Sigil for inserting chapters in epubs and epub manipulation in general.

In the end I found that calibre does a decent job detecting chapters based on using header style "thing" within word in the document. I simply went through the docs and made the chapter names "heading 1" within Word, saved to RTF, converted via calibre and presto.

Thats all I got, its not much, maybe a decent point in a semi-decent direction.

Thanks. Sigil is one of the ebook 'creators' that the author of the Calibre! uses.
I'm going to check them out later.

@Poet
Yes I realise that but, until such time that I can properly read pdf on the Kobo I have to format my converted files MYSELF.

[somecanuck]

I did this to a few conversions the other day. Here's what I did to produce nice, clean books.

1. Use "Calibre" to convert the file to an EPUB. While you're at it, edit the metainfo and insert a cover page.
2. Open the resulting EPUB in "7-Zip". Extract the HTML file(s).
3. If there's more than one HTML file, copy/paste them into a single large file (only the BODY contents of course).
4. Run "HTML Splitter" on the file, splitting on "H1" tags. You now have one HTML file per chapter.
5. Run "Sigil", load the EPUB. Delete the existing HTML files and import your newly created ones in other. Click the "Tools" menu and choose the TOC editor. It'll pick up the H1's and create a nice table of contents.

This sounds like a lot of work but it's fast after the first time you've done it. You do not need to produce separate HTML files per chapter, but I prefer to. It keeps chapters loading quickly.

Of course, this will not work if you do not have "H1" tags indicating your chapters. You can put these in manually if the conversion does not do it for you.

[JCSullivan]

Thanks SomeCanuck

[somecanuck]

To make it really simple, all it takes is running the EPUB through Sigil (step 5) to insert a proper table of contents, assuming that H1 elements exist (they usually do).

[foghat]

Originally Posted by somecanuck

To make it really simple, all it takes is running the EPUB through Sigil (step 5) to insert a proper table of contents, assuming that H1 elements exist (they usually do).

So you are saying steps 1 - 4 are not needed (if there is a H1 tag)? Just open the epub in Sigil, select tools --> TOC Editor and resave??

[somecanuck]

Yep, that's correct.

Adding metainfo helps for if your reader supports viewing books by title or author (like the Kobo) or other tags. Splitting it into a file per chapter keeps the loading times short. If the entire book is one file, you'll notice it's slow.

[kovidgoyal]

@somecanuck:

You can do that all in one go in calibre by simply setting the chapters XPath to //h:h1

[techie42]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

@somecanuck:

You can do that all in one go in calibre by simply setting the chapters XPath to //h:h1

Dude, you are my hero.