CSS heading counters & TOC?

[ghmerrill]

I'm using CSS counters in my heading tags to auto-generate chapter and section numbers that are prepended to the heading text (currently just for h2 and h3 headings). It all works perfectly well in the html pages, but the numbers don't appear in the TOC.

At this point, I'm assuming that Sigil just doesn't handle this degree of complexity in the use of CSS. But is there something I'm missing?

Is the only way to get the numbers into the TOC to put them there manually (and hence update them every time a new TOC is generated)?

Thanks for any insight.

[elibrarian]

Originally Posted by ghmerrill

I'm using CSS counters in my heading tags to auto-generate chapter and section numbers that are prepended to the heading text (currently just for h2 and h3 headings). It all works perfectly well in the html pages, but the numbers don't appear in the TOC.

At this point, I'm assuming that Sigil just doesn't handle this degree of complexity in the use of CSS. But is there something I'm missing?

Is the only way to get the numbers into the TOC to put them there manually (and hence update them every time a new TOC is generated)?

Thanks for any insight.

If I understand you correctly, you want a different text from the header (eg <h2></h2>) in the TOC?

If so, you can use the title property of the header tag:

<h2 title="1: On the First Day of Christmas">On the First Day of Christmas</h2>

Then Sigil will regenerate the TOC based on the text in the title tag.

I'm not sure, but I don't think the epub spec supports the CSS-way, you mention, even if it works in html pages.

Regards,

Kim

[DiapDealer]

There's no way I know of to get CSS to generate tag attributes. The ToC's text is derived from either the text content of the h tags, or the title attribute of the h tags (as elibrarian pointed out). But if the numbers don't exist until the html is rendered, there'll be no numbers for the toc generation routines to gather.

It's not just a Sigil thing, either. The internal toc pieces of an epub will simply not support dynamic content (with the exception of list elements in an EPUB3's NAV document.

[ghmerrill]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

... But if the numbers don't exist until the html is rendered, there'll be no numbers for the toc generation routines to gather.

It's not just a Sigil thing, either. The internal toc pieces of an epub will simply not support dynamic content (with the exception of list elements in an EPUB3's NAV document.

Thanks. I won't complain about it. Just wanted to be sure I wasn't overlooking something.

[AlanHK]

maybe one of these plugins could help:

AddIDs - Generates incremental ids
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=266120

ReworkChapterHeads - Add, replace and reformat chapter headings
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=301108

[ghmerrill]

Thanks. Some of that looks promising as an expedient. It would be better, of course, for the Sigil TOC generator to handle the relevant CSS in context and avoid ad hoc approaches. But if something like this works and isn't buggy, I'll likely use it rather than hand-editing.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by ghmerrill

It would be better, of course, for the Sigil TOC generator to handle the relevant CSS in context and avoid ad hoc approaches. But if something ...

I can tell you right now, that Sigil's ToC generator will not be rendering html or css for dynamic content. Way too involved.