Thread: [GUI Plugin] Modify ePub
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Old 07-08-2015, 12:05 PM   #970
Rev. Bob
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Join Date: Feb 2013
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Device: Kobo H2O, iPad mini 3, Kindle Touch
So I'm looking at one of my Google Play books' use of GBS anchors for page mapping, and it's a mess.

First of all, there are far more GBS anchors in the text than are used by the page map, and no apparent pattern to distinguish them. Second, the page map claims that the book has 128 pages, whereas Amazon lists 304... so what is the map relating to? Clearly not the printed book, which is the point of using a page map. Third, of course, the "page map" file is an Adobe extension, not part of the EPUB specs. Fourth, at least some of the mapped anchors appear in nonsense places - such as in the middle of an attribution line on a Praise blurb, where no sane designer would put an actual page break. This supports my belief that the GBS anchors and accompanying page map file are algorithmically generated nonsense. They may be of some use in a Google reader app, but not beyond that.

I am strongly tempted to simply junk the Google Play page-map file altogether. That simplifies the GBS anchor problem tremendously (kill 'em all) while losing something that appears to be of no value. Tweaking the cleanup routine to detect a GBS-based page map and remove it is a little more involved than some of my other cleanup, but not insurmountably so.

Are there any contrary opinions, or some counterbalancing evidence that I should see?
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