Hey guys, I am having trouble with making the Table of Contents look good in Kindle. After the export there are question marks so Scrivener seems to suspect I want those even though they don’t exist for mobi. If I delete the questions marks, I am still left with weird lines underneath. How can I make it look clean?
And if I go to the Contents function within the Kindle desktop reader, it does not show all the content, plus some weird lines. How can I control that?
Thanks!
It might be easier to start with a copy command more suited to e-book publishing. Try Edit/Copy Special/Copy Documents as Scrivener Links. But if you’d rather just proceed with cleaning up the remnants of what you have, try turning on invisible characters in the Format/Options/ sub-menu. That will usually illuminate the reasons for why things look odd. In this case you probably did not remove the Tab character in between the page number token and the title.
As for editing the “software” ToC that shows up in Kindle device menus and the sidebar as you show here, you need to make that edit to the compiled book itself. All you are changing with the other contents is the version a reader can browse to in the book itself. The built-in ToC on the other hand is automatically generated from your Binder structure. I’m not sure what the lines are, it could be there are some physical sections (anything with a “page break”) that do not have titles themselves in the Binder. Copyright and title pages perhaps?
At any rate, you can either enable the source file output in the KindleGen compile option pane to more easily edit the book’s components before turning it into a binary book—or if you’ve never messed with code before, you may find exporting to ePub and editing the book structure in a front-end like Sigil or Calibre to be easier. Once you’re done, with either approach, use Kindle Previewer to open either the component .opf file or the .epub file to convert it to Mobi.
Thank you!
I just don’t get how I can edit the ToC structure for kindle devices within Calibre…
Those headings that appear at the moment in the second screenshot are Level 1, the chapters that don’t appear are those that are notes within folders. Can’t I tell Scrivener somehow to make them appear in the kindle device?
Here is the help page for the Calibre editor. If you search for “table of contents” on that page you’ll find instructions.
Scrivener inserts a ToC entry for everything you designate as a section, be that automatically determined by the Separators (which incidentally is not level based, it just looks for “seams” and inserts a separator according to the rules here. A default setting is to insert a new section whenever a folder follows a file) pane in the compiler, or manually with the “Page Break Before” checkbox.
It worked with Calibre, thanks so much!