Issue with Chapters

Sun, 02/01/2009 - 21:53 — Anonymous

I am currently reading my first eBook (and I am hooked) so I don't know if it's the formatting or program limitation. Stanza (both Desktop and the iPod app) show there are 39 chapters. There are however 57 chapters in this book. I discovered that chapters 39 through 57 have been crammed together into one mega chapter. How can I fix this? I was able to download this book to my PC, but using Stanza (or MS Word) I don't know what to do to get the chapters to display correctly. Anyone?
Thank you!!

Tue, 05/19/2009 - 19:18 — Heidi (not verified)

chapters in some books

I have downloaded a number of classics from the Gutenberg project to my iphone Stanza app. Quite a few of them have chapter issues that have kept me from using them. I need them mainly for reference and so need to be able to skip around and look text up in various chapters. I was puzzled to find that in many instances large Victorian novels did not seem to have the last half of the book. I finally figured out that the text was there but the chapter headings linking to the last half of the book were not. While searching for references in the later part of Dickens "Little Dorrit" which Dicken's divided into 2 books, but which is together in one book in the digital version that nothing beyond book 2 had chapter headings. So no easy access to it even though the text was there. I tried opening it in other software including Stanza desktop and Adobe Digital Editions. In Digital Editions I could see that the chapters of book 2 begin again at 1 go to 34 and I assume that is the main problem, at least with this book. Is there anything besides renumbering the chapters of book 2 consecutively from the point left off in book 1 that I can do to make the links work and how would I do that. By the way in Adobe Digital Editions the link from the chapter headings in part 2 worked. The book is an epub. The file name is pg963.epub. I would appreciate any help as these books would be so useful to me and I would like to use them on Stanza on my iphone which seems to be a good application.

Tue, 02/03/2009 - 13:06 — K (not verified)

Emily Thank you for the info.

Emily
Thank you for the info. Actually had to edit a lot, but now the chapters are correct. Here's how the book originally viewed in Stanza Desktop and when I exported to .txt:

Text Text Text
Book Title
Book Title

TWENTY-TWO

Text Text text
Book Title
Book Title

TWENTY-THREE

So editing all 57 chapters to match your example worked great. Thank you again. Now I know how to correct if I ever come across this issue again.

As for where I got the book, I really am not sure... When I got my iPod Touch and discovered I could get books on it, I browsed a TON of book stores and repositories.... could have come from any of a dozen or so.

Thank you again Emily!

Tue, 02/03/2009 - 14:50 — Emily

I am glad it worked! If you

I am glad it worked!

If you do come across this problem again with an ePub whose origins you know, do let us know. We would love to be able to track down where these invalid ePub files are coming from. Thanks!

Mon, 02/02/2009 - 10:16 — K (not verified)

I exported the book to Word

I exported the book to Word format, and I observed how the other chapters were seperated. i then tried to edit to make the collapsed chapters the same. But it did not work..... in Word format, the chapter break was laid out so that the firs page of the new chapter had just the chapter number. So after chapter 2, the next page just says "Three" centered in the first row. The rest of this page is blank, then the next page begins the text. So I applied this to the collapsed chapters, but it did not change anything. (The collapsed chapters were not divided in this manor. So at the end of a chapter, there's a space, then the chapter number, a space, then right to the text.)
If there something I can do to correct, I'll try. This is not a major issue, just am annoyance. Thankyou for the info!

Mon, 02/02/2009 - 10:45 — Emily

I am not sure if you are the

I am not sure if you are the person who posted before. If you are, we would really be delighted to know where you got the file, though we do understand if you do not want to share that information. Thanks!

If you are interested in editing the file yourself, don't use Word. Do it in TextEdit (on Mac) or Notepad (on Window), and do it just like this:

1. Export your book as Plain Text.
2. Make the file look like this:

Chapter 1

blah blah blah....

Chapter 2

blah blah blah....

Chapter 3

blah blah blah...

3. Make sure that you are always using the word "Chapter" and that the numbers are always one larger than the previous number. Also make sure that there is a blank line before and after "Chapter X".
4. Save and open in Stanza Desktop.

Sat, 03/21/2009 - 08:25 — Anonymous (not verified)

I used your procedure in a

I used your procedure in a text file. The text I edit is in Farsi which is a right-to left language. I added "Chapter ..." as you had described in the desired places. It seems to be erratic. Sometimes I see good results and sometimes not, although I use the same procedure in the same text file. That is, sometimes the chapters will appear in Stanza in bold characters and show in "Go To Chapter" menu and sometimes not.

Sat, 03/21/2009 - 10:12 — Emily

There are other factors that

There are other factors that can interfere with chapter recognition, even when you give Stanza Desktop helpful hints. For instance, if one of the chapters is much larger or much smaller than the other chapters, Stanza Desktop sometimes decides not to make chapter boundaries.

In a future version of Stanza Desktop, we hope to enable more flexible chapter control. In the meantime, you might want to look into using Calibre, another free ebook management program. I believe that Calibre allows more user control over chapter boundary detection.

http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/

Sun, 02/01/2009 - 23:25 — Emily

Was this a book you

Was this a book you downloaded in another format, like Word or txt, and then opened in Stanza Desktop? Or was it a book originally in ePub format?

Sun, 02/01/2009 - 23:45 — K (not verified)

ePub. I exported as Word but

ePub. I exported as Word but I don't see what I can do to make a difference.

Mon, 02/02/2009 - 02:29 — Emily

This sounds a lot like

This sounds a lot like something we have been seeing lately.

There is a bug in the ePub validator that is letting ePub files with incorrect chapter tags get through, and I suspect your file is one of these ePub files. If that's the case, there's nothing Stanza can do because it's a problem in the ePub itself.

If it is this problem I am thinking of and if you are interested in editing the ePub yourself, I can try to explain how to fix it. Another alternative is to try reading your book with Adobe Digital Editions. Sometimes, by chance, Adobe Digital Editions picks up the chapters in spite of the invalidity. (Sometimes not, though!)

Would you mind telling us where you got the book? If you'd rather send me an email to tell me, just log in here and post again, and I will email you. I'd like to confirm that this is the same bug, and we would like to figure out why people suddenly started writing their ePubs with this incorrect data. Thanks!