Is it possible to assign images for Table Of Contents in Sigil?

You don't give us enough info to help you out. Why use images for chapter headings? Are they supposed to be extra artsy or something, maybe with flames coming off them, or water dripping from them?

You can override the default style of the headers like this, which is exactly what I did in my latest book.

<h2 style="">Chapter 33 - Title</h2>
<h3 style="">Subchapter name</h2>

In style you would use CSS keywords to specify various over-rides of the defaults. See the following link for more info on specific keywords.

http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

Here are some actual examples.

<h2 style="text-align: center; text-indent:0; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 14pt;">Chapter 1 - Resurrection</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: center; text-indent:0; margin-top: 14pt; margin-bottom: 14pt;">Accident</h3>

Around everything I put a DIV command, this one in fact.

<div style="line-height:120%; text-align:justify; text-indent:1.5em; font-size:14pt; font-family:Times New Roman,Times,serif; color:#000000; background-color:#ffffff;">
EVERYTHING
</div>

The default paragraph style for Amazon .mobi/.prc and Barnes & Noble/Apple .epub is one line after each paragraph. To over-ride that I use this construction.

<p style="margin-bottom: 0;">Content of paragraph.</p>

For each of my six books I've used Sigil to create an epub first, then Calibre to create the .mobi/.prc for Amazon. It take literally one-two minutes to create the Amazon file.

If you're doing this for an ebook you plan to distribute via Amazon etc.

Be aware that while it's likely possible to accomplish what I think you want, it may not be in all the formats—I especially have doubts about Mobi.

An epub or mobi is going to have two tables of contents an NCX file which is what you're talking about when you say the "TOC menu" and an html TOC (I think the proper term is "inline table of contents" but everyone calls it an "html toc") which is what you mean when you say you're going to do them inside the book itself.

The "toc menu"/NCX is the toc.ncx file. I don't think you can do anything with the NCX and graphics or formatting because how it displays depends on the device or program you're using. Even if technically you can, it would be unwise to because I don't think there's any devices that would actually display it correctly. I found a pretty good blog post about NCX files and you can see how different kindle devices handle it completely differently.

The second is the html TOC, which is a text document that you can see in the body of the text as you page through and has html links to other parts of the text. This goes in the text folder as another page and you use html links. You can definitely style this one as it's just another page in your book.

I think your method is going to be to create it all. Then go into the toc.ncx and type the chapter titles as text only, then create an html TOC and you can use the graphics there and manually link to the chapter heads.

Once you have an epub, you should be able to convert it to mobi by opening it in the downloadable Kindle Previewer. That uses kindlegen directly and supports the most complete formatting settings that that Amazon devices can handle. It will also let you look at how your book looks various kindle models. If you're using color, you definitely want to look at that as it can be a really big deal. Some colors that may look vivid on the screen of an ipad or Kindle Fire will appear as a washed out grey on a regular e-ink kindle or Nook.

I've found Kindle Previewer has trouble converting epubs to .mobi/.prc in several ways. I use Calibre to do that job. The output file is also a fourth the size of the one created by Previewer.

Katie Elle said:

[Previewer] will ... let you look at how your book looks various kindle models. If you're using color, you definitely want to look at that as it can be a really big deal. Some colors that may look vivid on the screen of an ipad or Kindle Fire will appear as a washed out grey on a regular e-ink kindle or Nook.

Click to expand...

Absolutely. You may need to experiment with enhancing color images so that they look good both in color and grey-scale.

YES is the answer to your first question: Is there a way to make images as TOC entries? Here is how you would do it using Sigil and Calibre.

Create your chapters as you desired, using JPEGs instead of text for the chapter titles. You could probably use GIFs instead, maybe PNGs. They could have effects such as flashing, morphing, etc. Ridiculous, perhaps, but possible.

Create your table of contents. Inside it you would have links to the chapters.


Use Sigil to create an .epub, including in it the ToC and the individual chapters. To make sure the result is what you desire, open the .epub in Adobe Digital Editions or the add-on for Firefox to read epubs. (Download it from the following link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/epubreader/ .)


You would open the test.epub file with Calibre. Then select the option Convert Books -> Convert Individually and select your test file.

In the popped up window select the Table of Contents option. Select box labeled Force use of auto-generated Table of Contents.

Also select the MOBI Output option. Here you can specify the title of the ToC and choose to put the generated ToC at the beginning instead of the end of the .mobi file. These are optional steps; they are your choice.

Now click OK to create the .mobi file. When the rotating clock image stops you can open the file where Calibre put the resulting file.


Open it in the Kindle Previewer and observe the results. There should be both a regular ToC and an NCX ToC.


You can create the individual chapters in Word, using the Insert Picture function to put your graphical title into the file. Then below it add whatever text you want. Save the document using the Filtered Web Page HTML file type.

My experience is that even this option does not get rid of all the Microsoft stuff from the .htm file. I use the MS Office HTML Filter program. It's likely available on your computer already, using Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft Office Tools -> Microsoft Office HTML filter 2.0. Otherwise download it from Microsoft at this link.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/office2000prem/msohtmf/2000/WIN98/EN-US/msohtmf2.exe

Sigil will add ?xml and !DOCTYPE lines to your .htm files. This is good.

If you MUST hand code your HTML files, they should look like this.

<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<p><img src="image001.jpg" /></p>
<p>Text of chapter.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Click to expand...

<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<h1>Table of Contents</h1>
<a href="chapter1.htm">Chapter 1 - Title</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Click to expand...

Very clever! Thanks for adding to the thread!

I haven't tested it out yet, but the good thing about it is that it may be a very general way to do this.

Anyone else tried it?