"Offending" hyperlink bug in InDesign CS5 causes TOC to fail and missing text

[eggheadbooks1]

Hi everyone:

While converting my latest book, [self-promotion removed - moderation], into an ePub from InDesign CS5, I stumbled upon another annoying bug: if any external hyperlinks contain an ampersand in the address, InDesign will fail to parse the link and any content that succeeds the link will fail to export, but InDesign will not return any error message to tell you what happened. If you are working from a single file, the ePub will fail to export and ID will crash; if working from book file, the book will export but any text in the individual xhtml file that contains the offending link will fail to be generated past the point of the link.

The addendum to this bug is that if you have a TOC that makes use of headers for generation, if using the book function the file/chapter level entries will be generated but not any header-based TOC entries because, it appears, this code is generated last and since InDesign fails to export anything after the link, the TOC entries will be missing. That's how I figured out the problem: only those chapters where text was missing also had missing h2 entries in the TOC.

Many thanks to John Schember, lead developer of Sigil, and regular contributor on this forum, for figuring out the ampersand issue: all instances of an ampersand in a link had to be amended in the Hyperlinks Options to "&". Once that was done, both the problem of missing text and missing TOC entries were solved simultaneously.

Just passing the solution on.

Michelle
[non-forum made signature link removed - moderation]