Render fictioneer_chapter_group, fictioneer_other_title metafields and fictioneer footnotes in ePUB output

[dreaktr]

If chapters have the following metafields set,

• fictioneer_chapter_group = As 1st Heading in TOC
• fictioneer_other_title = As subtitle or replace altogether the main title.

Eg.

TOC

Volume 1 (fictioneer_chapter_group, 1st heading)
|__fcn_chapter title - fictioneer_other_title (2nd heading)

As for fictioneer footnotes, render them as footnotes you would normally see in epubs containing footnotes

@Tetrakern

[Tetrakern]

You do not need to at-mention me afterwards if I'm not responding immediately, I get an email and a second one isn't going to make me respond faster considering that I'm doing this in my free time.

As for your idea, this may be something you want but not necessarily everyone else. If anything, I'm willing to provide some filters for customization, but the ePUB converter is held together by string and wishful thinking. I'm surprised it works, with what can go wrong in there at any given time. Never mind that ePUBs are built completely different via the DOMDocument class. You can not just filter some HTML to change the output.

This is how the ToC links are built:

foreach ( $args['toc_list'] as $item ) {
  $toc_item = $toc->createElement( 'li' );
  $toc_link = $toc->createElement( 'a' );
  $toc_title = $toc->createElement( 'span', $item[0] );
  $toc_num = $toc->createElement( 'span', $item[2] . '.' );
  $toc_num->setAttribute( 'class', 'num' );
  $toc_link->setAttribute( 'href', $item[1] );
  $toc_link->appendChild( $toc_num );
  $toc_link->appendChild( $toc_title );
  $toc_item->appendChild( $toc_link );
  $table_of_contents->appendChild( $toc_item );
}

It doesn't even have the group or alternative title available because they are not queried. Since there are authors with thousands of chapter per story, this would also be a performance issue and the converter is already slow. I do not recommend messing with the script by using get_post_meta() or worse either, because that will cause a database query each time you call it. Good way of crashing your database if you have enough chapters.

Anyway, this is currently just not feasible. Maybe when I'm bored (or get payed) to optimize the ePUB converter a bit, I can look into querying additional fields for customization. But even then, the links aren't going to sort themselves into the structure you want by asking nicely.