is NCX necessary?

[nathan goater]

Hi

I have uploaded a short story to smashwords, but have not included any form of NCX. I have also not put in place any bookmarks that an NCX could be created from.

Is this a problem for epub? Autovetter doesn't seem to have complained and the Premium Status is "pending review", so it looks okay, but thought I should ask all the same.

Kind regards

John

[Ted]

An author doesn't create the NCX in MSWord, as the NCX is created for ePub format by the conversion process.

The NCX is created from data an author supplies in a Table of Contents. You felt your readers didn't need a Table of Contents and therefor didn't make one.

You will likely be rejected for not having something resembling a TOC, so you might want to consider revising your ebook to include some manually created form of TOC. This has been discussed before on the forum.

[nathan goater]

Hi Ted

Thanks for replying.

Yes, that is right I didn't think the story needed a table of contents, I mean, it is only 5000 words, but if it is going to be rejected then I will put one in.

I have looked for the answer to this, and I've read the smashwords style guide, so I genuinely have missed it, but there is a snag if you search for terms NCX or TOC in this forum as they are too short for the search and so are ignored.

I realise this is off topic, but could I put forward a feature request to add TOC and NCX to some sort of search whitelist, so that this forum software wouldn't ignore them, but would search on them?

Thanks again
John

[Ted]

I'd love to have a whitelist for searches on this forum, but it's free and I have to settle for what ProBoards provides. Maybe their next update will include more customization by forum admins.

Using the search term "table of contents", without the quotation marks, expanding the search date range to 7777, and number of returns found to 30, resulted in 8 topics relating to TOC and NCX. One returned search included an example of a TOC:

"Edith, my picture ebooks for children have a TOC which I build manually.

Try something like this:
Table Of Contents
Your ebook title
Appendix (Or Biography, or something like those)
Where to contact me. (Or some third item)

That would give you three links and probably work.

Hope this helps."

Read more: smashwords-forum.proboards.com/index.cgi#ixzz21CGzIVE1

[nathan goater]

Yes it does help a lot, thank you.

As an aside, I have just checked in Adobe Digital Editions the epub version of the story. Is it meatgrinder that works on the uploaded files? Well, the epub has two navigation items of the title page and the midpoint. Presumably that means an NCX of some sort has been created? I know this is not ideal, and I am going to rectify this in the future by adding my own, but do you think this will be good enough for the manual review?

I will make sure I search the forum thoroughly before posting too.

Kind regards

John

[Ted]

John, reread "Step 20a - Creating the NCX File" in the Smashwords Style Guide.