Selective Table Of Contents

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hi there,

In my e-book template, my table of contents wants to include my title page, copyright page and dedication page (as well as all my chapters). Obviously, I want all these things in the compile but is there any way to be selective about what appears in the TOC?

Ideally, I would just like the title page and the chapters.

Any help appreciated.

Kind Regards

2

I don’t think you can control this, at least not i Scrivener. The automatic e-book TOC is made for navigating and will include everything that starts as its own page.

3

You have VERY little control of the TOC for an eBook UNLESS you want to edit the HTML — which I am not willing to do.

In my book (both eBook and paperback) I searched for a way to not have to add blank pages the PDF version and share the same front matter between the PDF and eBook formats.

For printed books, all of the front matter sections should start on the Reco pages (right hand, odd numbered) EXCEPT for the copyright which should be on the back (verso side) of the Title page. I added a page-break to the Title page and appended the copyright information. Each document in the front matter had “Include in Compile”, “Page Break Before” and “Compile As-Is” checked. This solved the Recto / Verso page stuff without any blank pages. The TOC contents were a non-issue for the PDF version since you get to hand-select and edit the TOC page. I chose not to have the front matter show up in the TOC but could have added it with a second copy-special and paste to the TOC page and a little reformatting.

It didn’t work for eBook formatting. Every top-level entry AND every forced page-break in the binder seems to show up in the eBook TOC with the title of the binder entry. In my case, I got two pages called “Title Page - Copyright Page”. Not exactly what I wanted. After considerable effort, I ended up with separate front matter for each type of book.

4

Does anyone know if there is a way to divide the table of contents a little?

For example, create some space between the front matter and the chapters:

Copyright
Title Page
Dedication

Chapter 1
Chapter 2

5

For ebooks - no, for printed books - yes.

6

Is it a Scrivener thing?

I’ve bought plenty of Kindle books that have a line space somewhere in the TOC

7

I think it requires that you edit the .mobi file, which you can’t do in Scrivener.
You could possibly experiment a bit, putting a chapter/folder with no title or content in your Binder, and see what happens.

8

Thanks, lunk. I’ll try those things.

Kind Regards

9

Just to clarify, ebooks actually have two table of contents-like features.

The first is the menu, generated from the list of sections by the ebook reader software itself. This is completely out of Scrivener’s control.

The second is a component of the ebook itself, generated by Scrivener when you compile the ebook. This document is customizable. See Section 23.2 of the (Mac) Scrivener manual for more information.

Katherine

10

thanks, Katherine.