How to use a macro or Find/Replace to make ToC link targets into links themselves pointing back to the ToC in Libreoffice?

Question

I am exporting a very large document (1400+ pages) to ebook, and have already worked out the Table of Contents (ToC) as hyperlinks to all the chapters and sections, and the hyperlinks work fine after being exported to the target ebook format so that part is done.

Now I want to make all the link targets in the ToC into links themselves pointing back to the appropriate page of the ToC.

I do not wish to attempt this manually one by one, as there are hundreds of entries in the ToC, so I am looking for help to figure out how to take the link target information from the ToC, find said target in the text body, and then convert that target into a link pointing back to the correct ToC page automatically.

Thus my question is how to use a macro or Find/Replace to make ToC link targets into links themselves pointing back to the ToC in Libreoffice?

Answer 1

I have never tried it before, but one option might be to convert it from ODT to epub using Calibre. It's a very user friendly tool, but also has lots of configurable options.

I don't see documentation for it, but I see a thread on mobileread (8 years old) where the lead developer (who made Calibre) comments that if the link is correctly made in ODT or .docx the links will be converted automatically in the epub output.

You should definitely try that. But first I would create a simple test document using three or four chapters (defined by the HEADING style) and then try the conversion and see what if anything needs to be tweaked.

Sometimes when I am doing a complicated conversation, it takes a few tries to work out (sometimes MS Word works better than LibreOffice for these advanced tasks, be forewarned).