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Old 08-02-2013, 02:23 PM   #42
neoveninet
nvt
neoveninet began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 2
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Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: Iceland
Device: kindle paperwhite; kindle touch
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch View Post
Well, I have two comments.
  1. Setting text color to black guarantees returns from Amazon (assuming that the book sells and people read it); both from readers, and, eventually, a nastygram from Amazon saying that they've taken your book down, as it isn't readable in Night Mode, because you set the text color to black, not automatic, so when Night Mode is chosen, absolutely NONE of your links will be visible, at all, and,
  2. I, for one, don't understand how/why on earth anyone would de-underline links meant to go to a glossary, index, or footnotes. While I can understand why some people dislike the underlining on the TOC, removing them from all other links seems utterly counterintuitive. How will your readers know that the word in the body text has a link, to click? By Telepathy? And if you have users who are not expecting links, why would they look for them? Is the expectation that they'll somehow see the pointing hand on the word, through inadvertence? Or as if the cursor reads word-by-word, which it doesn't?

I don't mean to sound snarky, but I had this situation with a client recently, with some 700+ footnotes in his book. He loathed the dreaded "blue" links in his book, which had a color scheme. I said, sure, fine, we can change it to black, as long as you understand that in Night Mode, no one will be able to see them. That was the end of that discussion. We had another client who also wanted some several hundred glossary items linked, from the first occurrence of each word, to the glossary. He then had a cow over the underscores. I asked him: how will your readers know to click the word? What possible clue is provided that the word is a link? That discussion was also over with rather quickly.

FWIW, I have found, over the course of some 2K books, that readers do NOT know that the TOC items are linked when they are NOT underlined. I've seen complaints from readers in reviews about "not linked TOC's," when the old prc (mobipocket) tags were used, and the TOC entries WERE linked...but the readers couldn't tell that they were. People are accustomed to seeing underscores under links.

Lastly, if By 2, in your post, I understand that the idea is that each anchor link has to have inline CSS...thanks, but I think I'll stick with either underscores, or find a different way. That feels as though it's fallback coding for K7, not for K8, and the problem is, if you put it inline, then you're overriding the CSS for the K8 files. Not to mention, I'm a firm believer in not using inline CSS unless there's simply no other alternative. {shrug}

Hitch
..it seems that I've mismatched something , but anyway my point was personal, I'm not a publisher or something , adjust it to whatever your needs are!
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