Okay. This is an update and an important addendum to my tutorial on Creating Fixed Layout Books with Jutoh and it has to do with the table of contents. I realized that there is an issue in the fact when I automatically created the table of the contents with Jutoh by going up here to book, build table of contents, you’ll notice I took that out and I want to show you why. Make sure you have the newest version of Jutoh which is at least 2.28.8 because there are some important additions, but if we go to build table of contents to try again, now you’ll see, “Sorry, automatic table to contents creation is not supported for fixed layout projects. Please create it manually.”
What I’m going to do is show you how to do that. What we’re going to do is go up to the organizer content, click new document, but instead of book section, we want to create a fixed layout page, we’ll call it table of contents, you can call it whatever you want, and we’ll hit okay, move it up to the top and you’ll notice I also renamed some of these and that’s just for your own use, but it’s easy as a reference for me so we’ll call this Havana Street Scene. We go in here to the organizer, right click, rename, Havana Street Scene, hit okay, and the same with four, we’ll call this Dance for Django. This is assuming every one of your pages has a chapter. If you just have a bunch of pictures you don’t need to do this, but this is just to make it simpler for you to see.
We’ll go to table of contents, we’re going to create a new text object, we’ll call it text, it doesn’t matter, spread that out a little so we have some more room to work, we’ll type table of contents and here’s where it gets different and you can do this with regular Jutoh books too but it’s just easier with the build table of contents, that’s why most people don’t manually add them, but we’ll go here table of contents, now we see on the left In the Studio, Varadero Beach, Havana Street Scene, Dance for Django, so we’ve got four of them in there.
Just to be consistent, we’ll make this table of contents heading and what you do here is you just highlight, right click, you can hit insert and this time we’re going to go link to page and it’s very easy. We hit In the Studio, that’s another nice reason to use the organizer and name the chapter so we’ll do that. It doesn’t have to be chapters too. You could do subchapters. It’s very flexible. We’re going to do the same thing, insert, link to page, Varadero Beach, copy back, okay on back and we’re almost done with what we need to do but there’s a couple more steps because we’re doing this manually.
You’ve got your links there so what we have to do is go to table of contents and we’re going to go to properties and you’ll see here it says guide type, this is very important if you want the table of contents to be recognized in the e-reader so we’ll go here and we’ll call it TOC, you can only have one of those so make sure you only have one table of contents. There’s other ones here which I’m not going to get into, but for our needs today TOC or table of contents and one other thing, we have to click out of here so we’re not in the text so it’s just highlighted as the text area and you’ll notice we’re at page or objects depending which thing you used last, we need to go to properties, very important we go to region because you can’t have the URLs, the links as magnifiable so we’re going to click off of inherited properties and click off magnify objects so right now it will not magnify which most fixed layout books will allow, but in this case table of contents links, links inside any text actually, they cannot be magnifiable.
We hit okay and now we’re going to run it. We’re going to compile. In fact, I’ll show you how to get rid of this real quick, this metadata fields. Just in case you don’t know, you can click on this and it’ll pull up project properties cover, we’re going to go to metadata, we’ll call this my Havana Book, it doesn’t matter. Now we’ll get rid of the warning so nobody calls me out on it, not that it matters. Okay, so we’re going to hit compile. Okay, so that’s done. You can see it’s all ready and the nice thing is approximate KF8 or KF7 size is around 848 kilobytes so even with those four pictures which I did nothing to except pull them right off the camera, Jutoh automatically took care of a lot of the resizing for you. All of that’s adjustable, but for basic stuff unless you’re really trying to tweak it, this should be perfect.
All right, so let’s load this up and see what happens now. All right, so it goes to your first chapter. We’ll go to Kindle Fire, it’s a little easier to see. Hit table of contents and you can see we have our table of contents there, we click it and it’ll go wherever you need to go. Our formatting all works, basically everything is the way we wanted. If we go to the cover, we can see our beautiful cover, table of contents, four great pages, and just like that you have yourself a very usable Kindle book without dealing with all the other complicated projects.
Never miss a new release or sale!
Sign up for my newsletter and get a free book!