Generating a rough "table of contents"

[Vanguard3000]

Currently, I'm using a Kobo for ereading, and as you all may know, there's no way to simply skip to a certain page. What this can mean is, with some epubs not formatted with a table of contents, getting through to where you left off on your hard copy of the book can mean tons and tons of page turns.

I was wondering if there was a way for Calibre, while converting an epub, to make up a table of contents by simply breaking up the file into a user-specific number of sections (say, ten), and marking those as "chapters" on the ToC. That way, the reader could at least fast-forward to the 70%-mark of the book, and find their place from there.

Calibre seems to have several ToC options available in the conversion menu, but none of them seem to work for me, and I don't seem to be seeing my answer in the help pages.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Dopedangel]

I dont think thats possible

What are your source files for generating epubs
normally calibre just checks H1 and H2 tags but most books I acquire use H3 for chapter heading so I use this for chapter detection

//*[((name()='h1' or name()='h2' or name()='h3') and re:test(., 'chapter|book|section|part\s+', 'i')) or @class = 'chapter']

and this for page breaks before every chapter

//*[name()='h1' or name()='h2' or name()='h3']

If chapters are still not detected I try to use notepad++ to add <h3> tags to the source files and use this in level 1 Toc as a last option never fails

//h:h3

[Vanguard3000]

So far, I've been adding in <h1/2/3> tags manually, but it gets quite tedious. The ones I dread specifically are Frank Herbert's Dune books. First off, they're very long books, with lots of chapters; and they don't have normal chapter headings (and therefore, no <h> tags already in the epub file).

So, I'm pretty much stuck putting them in myself, then?

[ldolse]

Try enabling the preprocess option under structure detection - one of the things it does is tries to detect common chapter headings and wrap them in <h2> tags so you don't have to. It's not always going to work, and can stick headings where you don't want them in rare cases, but generally should do ok.

If your book already has heading tags then that feature won't help you, you just need to look at the html to see what the right xpath needs to be.

You can make the default xpath match a lot more if you change it to this:

/*[((name()='h1' or name()='h2' or name()='h3') and re:test(., '.*', 'i')) or @class = 'chapter']

That may match too much, but if you're looking for a way to get more reliable 'rough' tocs that could help.

[Dopedangel]

Originally Posted by Vanguard3000

So far, I've been adding in <h1/2/3> tags manually, but it gets quite tedious. The ones I dread specifically are Frank Herbert's Dune books. First off, they're very long books, with lots of chapters; and they don't have normal chapter headings (and therefore, no <h> tags already in the epub file).

So, I'm pretty much stuck putting them in myself, then?

depends upon the headings let say the heading are all caps you can make a regex that would set all full Cap words as headings but I am not good at regex but there are others here who would be able to help.

[ldolse]

Originally Posted by Dopedangel

set all full Cap words as headings but I am not good at regex but there are others here who would be able to help.

This, as an example is one of the things the preprocess option will do.