How to create a ToC entry in epub for chapter without headline?

[SueCampbell54]

This has come up many times for me. How to create a ToC entry for a chapter or section that doesn't have a headline to use for the toc? 

Also related to this, how do you designate the point at which you want the book to open? Usuall this is the first item in the ToC, I think. But what if the page you'd like to see first doesn't have an ToC entry? 

Is there a way to have a ToC entry created for a page where those words don't show up on the page? 

In one book with a complex chapter opener that required me to make the header into an image, I made invisible tags for the chapter noumbers, this worked great but were rejected in Kindle, and the only solution I could do was to create teeny tiny white words at the top margin. These only showed up when the book was in night mode, but worked. Is there another way?

[Creamer Training]

I haven't tried this, but have you used Conditional Text? Show it when creating the TOC, hide it when exporting.

[SueCampbell54]

This has more to do with getting it to work when exporting an epub. There isn't a ToC on the page in the epub, I'm using the ToC NCX to generate the functional ereader ToC for navigation. So I don't think showing or hiding the ToC has anything to do with it. There simply isn't a word (paragraph style) to hook it to.

[Creamer Training]

Sorry--I wasnt clear. I wasn't referring to hiding the TOC. I was referring to the text in the page layout that is used to build the TOC.

You don't need the TOC on the page or even need to generate the TOC for the EPUB navagation. (If you do generate the TOC for proofing, you can place it on the pasteboard but it's really not used.)

 However, after testing, I can verify that conditional text will not solve your problem.

[SueCampbell54]

Oh yeah. I have tried the text off the page option. The box has to be touching the page to work, but in the epub it picks up the text and puts it on the page. Not an option.

I did do one like this where the chpater opener was complete an image, I place a tiny (like 1pt white) word to make the ToC link. It worked "okay..." unless the viewer went to night mode then they could see it. Teeny tiny, but still. I did even discover that I could code it as invisible which worked in the epub, but naturally Kindle wouldn't accept that. (Where nearly all books are sold.) 

Was just hoping somebody had found a solution. 

[Creamer Training]

The only thing I can think of is to change the .epub extension to .zip, manually edit the TOC file, then change the extension back. (If you are using Mac, you have to take a couple of more steps due to the un-/re-zipping.)

OR, you can use Calibre to edit the TOC in the EPUB.

[SueCampbell54]

Yes, I always unzip and tweak the code. But the toc still needs words on the page to link to. Unless I am totally mistaken that you could link to an image, but so far that has not worked.

[Creamer Training]

Assuming the images are inline, that should work if you create a special paragraph style just for the images. (I usually have to do this in PDFs since I use absolute leading on my text, but the figure anchor style needs auto leading.) Then add that style to the TOC style. (If you don't need every image added, you will have to create two anchor styles, such as FigureAnchor_TOC and FigureAnchor_NoTOC.)