syosetu "chapters"

[pastel raschke]

Syosetu has two levels of organization for serialized stories. One is called 部分 (part) or 話 (episode). This level is required; it has the enumerated URLs that make up the content of the story, and is equivalent to most webfiction sites' idea of chapters.

There is a second level of organization only visible in the table of contents. This is called 章 (chapter/section). This level is optional; when enabled, each episode must belong to one section and each section must contain at least one episode.

Both of these levels require titles, and the distribution of structural information is up to the author. One example (https://novel18.syosetu.com/n8826fa/) leaves titles completely inside the section level and episodes are only given numbers. Another example (https://ncode.syosetu.com/n8125fg/) reproduces section titles in the episode titles.

In my ideal world, these section titles would appear in the epub toc nav/ncx as headings with episodes nested under them, as well as in the text between chapters. FFF doesn't support TOCs that aren't flat lists of linked chapters, or non-chapter text outside of some hardcoded exceptions.

Can you think of any easy way to include this information without requiring significant changes to FFF?

[Jim Miller]

Correct.  FanFicFare as currently designed cannot nest TOC entries.

Looking at your examples, episodes and sections both appear on the same
page, and episodes are the links to the pages containing the story
text.  And, as you said, not all stories have sections of episodes.  So
episodes are the clear choice to use as FFF chapters.

I would concatenate the section and episode strings for each chapter by
default, but add a configurable setting to not prepend the section
strings.  And maybe a third option to only prepend the section string to
the first episode in each section.  Something like prepend_section with
values true, false, and firstepisodeonly?

You could try to include code to automatically detect when the author
already included the section in each episode title, but I don't see
anything like a convention on that.  If you do, there should also be a
config setting for users to turn it off if they like.