How to make a TOC page?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Yes, thrawn_aj:

I know that Calibre can and does generate an html toc when you convert from ePUB to mobi; but that first-generation mobi isn't saleable on Amazon, as Calibre's mobi's don't leave enough room in the headers for K4PC's second layer of encryption. And the html that Calibre generates is fine, but it is rather crowded with Calibre styles. It could be used, though, no two ways about it.

As I said somewhere--in this thread?--we're putting together a clip in-house to convert toc.ncx to an html toc w/appropriate entries in the spine and guide to facilitate clean conversion w/o all the CSS flattening. (Hopefully. ;-))

Hitch

Has this issue been reported so the mobi generation code can be fixed?

[Hitch]

JSWolf:

It has indeed. I had a lengthy thread in the Calibre forum and discussed it in the thread with Kovid; and had private correspondence with him on same. I obtained approval from a client to use his books as testbeds for Kovid and sent Kovid the mobi made by Calibre that did not work, and the KindleGenned file, from the same ePUB originally, that did, so that Kovid could compare the Headers, and provided Kovid with all the correspondence by and between myself and Amazon.

This was discussed on the Calibre forum some months ago, when I discovered that I could not open a DRM'ed client file that I dl'ed from Amazon on K4PC. (Said Mobi having been made by Calibre from a Sigil ePUB). My original worked fine on both device and K4PC; but the client couldn't dl to K4PC...and about 3 weeks later, after MUCH correspondence with Amazon, it was determined it was the header space that causes the problems.

On a bright note, that plus another item got me my own Technical Account Manager there, at Amazon's Kindle Publishing unit, so that was a silver lining. For me, anyway.

In the interim, we've written our own clip, in-house, which now converts Sigil ePUBs into ePUBs that we then feed into KindleGen, and it works great; even generates a nice html TOC to make Kindle happy. Saves me about 20 minutes per mobi conversion, which doesn't sound like much until you do it 10 times a day. ;-)

Hitch

[crutledge]

Originally Posted by Hitch

JSWolf:

In the interim, we've written our own clip, in-house, which now converts Sigil ePUBs into ePUBs that we then feed into KindleGen, and it works great; even generates a nice html TOC to make Kindle happy. Saves me about 20 minutes per mobi conversion, which doesn't sound like much until you do it 10 times a day. ;-)

Hitch

Converting Sigil to MOBI was not difficult once I asked a lot of questions and finally got everything into one sack.

The following OPF guide is modified in the Sigil OPF and handles most needs.

    <guide>
        <reference type="cover" title="Cover" href="Text/COVER.xhtml"/>
        <reference type="title-page" title="Title Page" href="Text/TITLE_PAGE.xhtml"/>
        <reference type="toc" title="Table Of Contents" href="Text/Table of Contents.xhtml"/>
        <reference type="text" title="Start Reading" href="Text/CHAPTER_I.xhtml"/>
    </guide>

Additional editing can handle Preface, Dedication, Copyright, etc.

The biggest problem as I see it in converting PG files is how MOBI will react to some of the "STYLES" used so well in Sigil and ePub. This is especially true with styles which modify "MARGIN", "PADDING", Hanging Indents and <p> tags inside "BLOCKQUOTE." MOBI is indeed crippled.

As limited as BD is, they went to great lengths to accomdate MOBI. I now understand the use of the <div> tag in place of <p>. Calibre does the same and seemingly modifies the code in converting to MOBI.

So, JSWOLF, I would be very interested in seeing how your efforts come to fruition. Until the Good Lord shakes the firmament and Amazon moves to ePub, we will struggle along.

Charlie

[JSWolf]

Actually, I've converted a few ePub recently to Mobipocket using Mobipocket Reader for Windows and the conversions came out pretty well.

[Danger]

Originally Posted by theducks

Maybe in Code View

If you can find a pattern to write a REGEX search against and replace term and change the current Tags wrapping the Chapter heading with the "h# tags.
Unfortunately, not all ( about 80% are) are single pass, simple , I recently did a 150 chapter book that had roman numerals in a single pass ("Chapter XI").

A bit late on this but I figured I'd give my 2cents... in code view, CTRL+F and search for "chapter" in ALL HTML files. Then at each chapter I replace the tags with H2... <h2>Chapter .... </h2>

[st_albert]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Actually, I've converted a few ePub recently to Mobipocket using Mobipocket Reader for Windows and the conversions came out pretty well.

Hmm, when I try that, it seems not to grok the UTF-8 encoding. Is there a workaround for that? (I haven't noticed this problem when using kindlegen or calibre for conversion from epub).