I’m pretty new to Scrivener, just nearing the end of my 1st book with it and have hit a problem. My search-fu is just leading to my getting confused, so thought I should ask as a new thread…
I’m doing a non-linear (choose-your-own story) book for Kindle, using links to jump to new sections, and have each section of the story starting on a new page. I’ve created a custom contents page which is stripped down to pretty much just ‘Introduction’, ‘The Story Starts Here’ and ‘Afterword’.
My problem is the NCX contents still show every single section and I don’t want that. I don’t want people to see the section names and so get an idea of what happens there, and I don’t need a contents page of what could be 200+ sections when I’m finished… So far I can’t find how to limit the NCX contents so that it is more like my custom contents page.
It is possible to edit the NCX file after compiling, you will need to enable the “Save the source files…” option in the KindleGen compile pane. This .ncx file is a simple XML file that can be edited to remove any unwanted sections from the list, using a plain text editor. Make sure that the play order numbers line up sequentially, after editing. Any of the files in this folder Scrivener creates can be edited, so one can even implement custom stylesheets and so forth. When completed, simply process the .opf file with KindleGen, or open it using Kindle Previewer, to generate a .mobi out of the folder’s source files.
If that looks too intimidating, you could take the approach of working in ePub instead, and using Calibre or Sigil to edit the table of contents using a GUI. When done, process the ePub with KindleGen or open it with Kindle Previewer.