Can I get TeX4ebook to include the html table of contents in an epub

Question

For the Kindle book I'm producing, I would like to have the .ncx ebook table of contents and an html table of contents as part of the book.

However, TeX4ebook doesn't include the html TOC (in this example, toctestli1.html) in the epub. Is there a way to get it to do so?

Here is my MWE:

\documentclass[]{book}
\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\chapter{One}
This is one\par
tra la la\par
\chapter{Two}
This is two\par
boodledy-boodledy\par
\end{document}

Using this config file:

\Preamble{xhtml}
\CutAt{chapter}
\begin{document}
\EndPreamble

(Incidentally, tex4ebook seems to just discard the html toc, because it will include subsections in the .ncx toc, even when they are excluded from the html toc)

Also, I do not have enough reputation to add TeX4ebook as a tag, but perhaps someone else could do so? I think I will have a number of other questions related to it. Thanks!

Answer 1

I looked into this issue and updated tex4ebook so it should work now. To add some background about the issue. Because of memory limits of e-readers, it is good to break ebook files into smaller chunks, so each chapter or section is in a standalone file.

In our example, following file structure is created:

toctest.html
   -> blank file

toctestli1.html
    -> table of contents

toctestch1-html
    -> chapter 1

toctestch2.html

table of contents is in standalone file, because files are are split even at starred chapters. file toctest.html is empty because there is no text outside chapters. this is because you haven't used \coverimage and/or \maketitle which are placed here normally.

The reason why \tableofcontents wasn't visible is that reading order was governed by modified tableofcotents command, which generated list of used files. But this tableofcontents didn't include starred chapters and sections, as well as other html files (for example footnotes generate separate files by default). All these files not included in tableofcontents were added in postprocessing with special attribute which causes them to not be included in normal browsing (you could find them only with link, for example the footnotes).

Fix for this issue is to path every sectioning command to register current filename in reading order. All cut files should be included in reading order now, but other files, like footnotes should be still accessible only with links.