Chapter or TOC Creation help needed

[gandor62]

I have a few books that have been scanned and while not very big they are in a RTF or TEXT format. I need to set up chapters (to enable faster loading with Stanza) but as the file is a text file there are no H2 or Class headers and when converted to Epub chapter 1 is the entire text.

Setting Force Autogenerated TOC doesnt seem to create any TOC for me. Just one large chapter. When I use Calibre built in viewer I am unable to see a TOC. Clicking the button for TOC has no effect.

All I have in the file is
at the begining of the file

Prelude

Book 1: Halfway
Chapter 1 Tower
Chapter 2 Help


Then further on

Prelude
Some text

Book 1: Halfway

Chapter 1 Tower
text here

Chapter 2 Help
more text



Im guessing that this is a problem with scanned texts but was hoping some one could help me to get it working, simply. Even if Calibre could just break the text file in to x amount of blocks for chapters Ie if file is 700kb then 70kb blocks or something. , but was hoping that calibe or something else would detect buy text match or something.

[p3aul]

I'm new here also, but let me share something I've learned.

First use either MS Word or OpenOffice Writer. Load you txt file in and give it a title. Select it and give it an h1 or heading 1 style. Mark each Chapter with a number and/or title. Give all these an h2 or heading 2 style. Save this file as an RTF file. In Calibre, read in the file. Choose "convert individual file". In the next dialog box select "Chapter Detection" If you have more than 50 chapters, increase the default. If you have less than 6 chapters, decrease the limit. Now, in "Level 1 TOC use "//h1". Thats for the title. IN Level2 TOC use "//h2" (don't use the quote marks!) That's all there is to it. I had troubles too, and they didn't go away till I used those simple xpath statements. There's lots more to that you can add, but you'll learn this as you go.
HTH
Paul

[kovidgoyal]

If they are in txt format, just add ## before each chapter title and as p3aul pointed out set your level 1 and level 2 TOC options.

[gandor62]

Ahhh ok. I was hoping for something simpler. I have revisited Stanza and it actualy automatically detected the chapters by a keyword I think, and broke the book down. Problem will be when the text file is nearly a megabyte and no text words to detect.

[p3aul]

Well there you go! Calibre is a wonderful tool and if you have to add a keyword for Stanza to detect the chapters, you might as well do as Kovid suggests and add the ## to your txt files.
Paul