Can we have TOC in markdown?

disfated · 03-19-2024, 07:32 AM

Calibre viewer is capable of opening markdown files, but for some reason, it doesn't generate a table of contents for them, even though it renders the headings perfectly fine.
Is it a bug, or am I missing something?

kovidgoyal · 03-19-2024, 07:45 AM

The viewer shows whats called a "metadata" table of contents. That is a separate table of contents not part of the document. Mardown doesnt have such a concept. You can do a conversion in calibre to epub and then view the epub. The conversion will auto generate the toc from headings or whatever you configure.

disfated · 03-19-2024, 09:38 AM

Yeah, I'm actually doing the complete opposite - converting EPUB to MD, since EPUBs are almost always overloaded with ugly styling and it takes way too much time to make edits compared to MD. I just thought it wouldn't hurt anyone if Calibre generated a table of contents out of MD headers. Seems like an easy thing to implement.

kovidgoyal · 03-20-2024, 12:03 AM

The point of the viewer is to hew as closely to the input document as practical. It's not going ot start doing all sorts of transformations to the input document. You have conversions for that. And you dont need to edit epubs to remove styling. The conversion dialog has various features to wasily remove commonly used CSS during conversion so you can just do an EPUB to EPUB conversion.

03-19-2024, 07:32 AM	#1
disfated Junior Member Posts: 2 Karma: 10 Join Date: Mar 2024 Device: none	Can we have TOC in markdown? Calibre viewer is capable of opening markdown files, but for some reason, it doesn't generate a table of contents for them, even though it renders the headings perfectly fine. Is it a bug, or am I missing something?

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03-19-2024, 07:45 AM	#2
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 44,536 Karma: 24495948 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	The viewer shows whats called a "metadata" table of contents. That is a separate table of contents not part of the document. Mardown doesnt have such a concept. You can do a conversion in calibre to epub and then view the epub. The conversion will auto generate the toc from headings or whatever you configure.

03-19-2024, 09:38 AM	#3
disfated Junior Member Posts: 2 Karma: 10 Join Date: Mar 2024 Device: none	Yeah, I'm actually doing the complete opposite - converting EPUB to MD, since EPUBs are almost always overloaded with ugly styling and it takes way too much time to make edits compared to MD. I just thought it wouldn't hurt anyone if Calibre generated a table of contents out of MD headers. Seems like an easy thing to implement.

03-20-2024, 12:03 AM	#4
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 44,536 Karma: 24495948 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	The point of the viewer is to hew as closely to the input document as practical. It's not going ot start doing all sorts of transformations to the input document. You have conversions for that. And you dont need to edit epubs to remove styling. The conversion dialog has various features to wasily remove commonly used CSS during conversion so you can just do an EPUB to EPUB conversion.