How to mark chapter headings

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by Suffolk Punch

I found the following introductory guide by Guido Henkel very clear, and recommend it:

http://guidohenkel.com/2010/12/take-...ook-formatting


Martin

Sorry, any e-book creator finalizing by doing a ePUB conversion in Calibre as finished product and claiming to create very good ePUB's I cannot take seriously.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Sorry, any e-book creator finalizing by doing a ePUB conversion in Sigil as finished product and claiming to create very good ePUB's I cannot take seriously.

I think you mean using Calibre to do the conversion.

But there are a lot of worse things being done in this tutorial. The worst offender is using a word processor to convert the quotes and apostrophes to left/right versions. So this "clean" code/text that once existed is not a horrible mess. If I had clean HTML to start with, I'd be using Sigil to keep it so since I would know the CSS styles I've created. This tutorial is a bit long winded to eventually botch it up near the end.

If you are wanting left/right quotes and apostrophes the easy way to do it is pick a character to use in place of a quote so all you do in the end is some simple search/replaces and you have it sorted. No need to get even near Word.

If this is a book that is not going to see print, a text editor is just fine to use to write the book. If it is also going to print, load the text file in and format it for print and leave the text version for conversion to the eBook versions.

[huebi]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Sorry, any e-book creator finalizing by doing a ePUB conversion in Sigil as finished product and claiming to create very good ePUB's I cannot take seriously.

In addition, he set the alt attribut of decorative images to a text string, resulting in a chapter name like

Chapter 1 pinewood

Whats defintly false. For decorative images the alt attribute must be present, too, but it can be empty and should be empty. Not showing the deorative images does have an effect of the understaning of the text, so the alt attribute must e empty.

If the image represents a graphical letter, so alt-attribute should be set to the letter be represented:

<h1><img src='../Images/bigC.jpg' alt = 'C' />hapter 1</h1>

So he defintly has no understandig about the role of the alt attribut .

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by huebi

In addition, he set the alt attribut of decorative images to a text string, resulting in a chapter name like

Chapter 1 pinewood

Whats defintly false. For decorative images the alt attribute must be present, too, but it can be empty and should be empty. Not showing the deorative images does have an effect of the understaning of the text, so the alt attribute must e empty.

If the image represents a graphical letter, so alt-attribute should be set to the letter be represented:

<h1><img src='../Images/bigC.jpg' alt = 'C' />hapter 1</h1>

So he defintly has no understandig about the role of the alt attribut .

I didn't read the whole thing, although it is much- and oft-touted on the KDP, but a) ditto on the Calibre bit, and b) when I saw, given the date of the original writing, the "display:none" written as though it would subsequently work in e-ink--which prior to 2.4 it certainly did not--I blew it off. That, and I'll avoid pointing out, from an author, this sentence: "Feel free to right-click the image and save it for your own perusal." A native English speaker and author, (not to mention, per his blog, "accomplished musician" and publisher) however, shouldn't confuse "perusal" and "for your own use."

Yes, that last bit was snarky, but really? "...get our book into Calibre to build a real ebook?" Zounds.

Hitch

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I think you mean using Calibre to do the conversion.

Err. yes of course I meant Calibre.

[Thalia Helikon]

Originally Posted by Serpentine

when closing tags are very easy to match with regex (unless they are nested, but in that case your solution is even worse).

I am not addressing experts, I am addressing beginners. If a person wants to make a table of contents, I provide step by step instructions to do just that.

Automagic exists for a reason, it is perfectly adequate for at least half of Sigil's users.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Thalia Helikon

I am not addressing experts, I am addressing beginners.

All the more reason NOT to suggest a solution that has a serious,nasty side effect for 99% of the EPUB I see. (IMHO these are poorly coded... BUT they are common )

[Serpentine]

Originally Posted by Thalia Helikon

Automagic exists for a reason, it is perfectly adequate for at least half of Sigil's users.

I just prefer people not to teach each other to run with scissors.

[JSWolf]

The easiest way to do chapters headings for a ToC is to be in book view. Highlight the title, select the second heading style from headings and when done. After all the headings are fixed, build a new ToC. It's that easy. Why would search/replace be needed?

[Jellby]

I know some people like to reserve the first heading style for the book title. I think that's unnecessary, though. The book title is already the file name probably, and in the TOC there's a specific name for it. As for styling the title page, it usually deserves more special coding than just using <h1> for the title (it has author name, date, illustrator, etc.).

So, in a simple book that is just divided in chapters, I'd use <h1> for each chapter, and have them appear as top-level divisions in the TOC. Of course, it would be different if there are parts, or if it's an omnibus edition with several books bundled in one.

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The easiest way to do chapters headings for a ToC is to be in book view. Highlight the title, select the second heading style from headings and when done.

If the chapter heading text has *no style* associated with it, the book view trick works.

However ever since 0.4.something, this feature is "broken" in my opinion if the text you are already highlight has a style. I am sure it *used* to be the case that applying a heading style using book view would result in whatever paragraph tags the text had being replaced with a plain <h3> type of tag. Now however it gets it wrong and just replaces the p with h3.

So if your text looks like this:
<p class="text">CHAPTER ONE</p>
You will end up with:
<h3 class="text">CHAPTER ONE</h3>

Which is *rarely* (i.e. never) what I want. So you end up having to do a regex afterwards, which you may as well have just done in the first place, much faster.

[meme]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

If the chapter heading text has *no style* associated with it, the book view trick works.

However ever since 0.4.something, this feature is "broken" in my opinion if the text you are already highlight has a style. I am sure it *used* to be the case that applying a heading style using book view would result in whatever paragraph tags the text had being replaced with a plain <h3> type of tag. Now however it gets it wrong and just replaces the p with h3.

So if your text looks like this:
<p class="text">CHAPTER ONE</p>
You will end up with:
<h3 class="text">CHAPTER ONE</p>

Which is *rarely* (i.e. never) what I want. So you end up having to do a regex afterwards, which you may as well have just done in the first place, much faster.

Actually, I think leaving the class tag is right. You've just told it to change the p tag to a heading tag, not to get rid of the class tags - which in some cases you might want. So what you want to do is erase the basic formatting/classes before applying the header tag - which isn't available yet but will be in the next version.

But if you've got classes or styles and are trying to control the layout that much, then certainly Code View and Find & Replace is the best approach. Trying to get Book View to format it exactly the way you want when you are fully aware of Code View, HTML and CSS will probably just drive you crazy

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

If the chapter heading text has *no style* associated with it, the book view trick works.

However ever since 0.4.something, this feature is "broken" in my opinion if the text you are already highlight has a style. I am sure it *used* to be the case that applying a heading style using book view would result in whatever paragraph tags the text had being replaced with a plain <h3> type of tag. Now however it gets it wrong and just replaces the p with h3.

So if your text looks like this:
<p class="text">CHAPTER ONE</p>
You will end up with:
<h3 class="text">CHAPTER ONE</p>

Which is *rarely* (i.e. never) what I want. So you end up having to do a regex afterwards, which you may as well have just done in the first place, much faster.

My copy of Sigil also replaces the </p> with </h2> when I use the second header style. I have no idea why yours leaves the </p> alone.

[JSWolf]

Leaving the classes is correct. The class could be what you want and all you are doing is making it so Sigil knows what may be ToC headers.

[kiwidude]

Sorry meme but we are going to agree to disagree on what it does being "right" on this one

I don't want my headings to have the same style as my paragraph text. *Ever*. But that is what the current Sigil behaviour does. In the "good old days" if I had a really badly formatted document (maybe a bad ocr where a regex isn't going to find all occurrences) I would use Book View to scroll through, fix paragraphs, chop pages, give the chapter headings an h3 or whatever style, flick to the stylesheet to add h3 {text-align: center} and it would be job done.

However now it is pointless using the book view style dropdown. Inheriting its existing styles is in my mind a regression that took place in 0.4.x compared to its original behaviour. Clearly you know way more than me about how difficult this is underneath the covers, I just found it strange it used to work the way I want it.