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2006-08-03 20:23:18 - Table of Contents Difficulty
The table of contents system that newton books utilize is a bit unweildy from an editor's perspective. In Newton Press, NP marked table of contents by their location in the text. As a particular word marked as a TOC entry moved around during editing, the TOC entry followed with it - this simplifies making the initial newton book, as one doesn't have to update the TOC entry whenever a chapter heading or whatnot is shifted to a different page.
The problem is that TOC entries in the newtonbook itself DISCARD this data - and only tie the TOC entry to the page number with which the TOC entry is associated. Newton Press could get away with this as it's native file format allowed for keeping track of more information about the book than the newton book format supports. NXP's native file format is newton book packages - so any book one opens to edit with NXP can't know precisely which words match up with the TOC entries.
I can work around this to start, and have the first word on the page marked in the TOC be the point with which the TOC follows, but this may not always be appropriate.
The newton package format is a very well developed object compartmentalized format. In theory, one could add extra entries to the package that the newton will ignore when displaying the book. I could possibly store the needed meta-information about TOC entries alongside the rest of the book, and the newton MAY not have a problem with that. This would allow NXP to keep specific track of what text the TOC entries are associated with. Of course - this would take extra storage space in the final product, for utility that only NXP will take advantage of.
If I can get this to work without the newotn complaigning about the extra data, would anyone mind the added bloat to newton book files (probably only a few bytes per TOC entry. ?
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