Quote:
Originally Posted by Freeshadow
what IMHO actually SHOULD exist in the specs is a common definition of "virtual-page-count" i.e. "n characters incl. spaces = 1 virtual page" it would allow better quoting from ebook-editions for scientific purposes.
keeping in mind that pre-typeset typoscripts (and thus a fair amount of not richly edited publications keep this layout in print) use the "standard page" reference i.e. 30 lines á 60 chars each defining a "virtual page" for purely referential purposes as being an "array of 1800 characters with space counted as a character" comes in mind.
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I'm not sure about this. What do we gain by keeping a fixed "page" concept?
I think we'd do better with something like paragraph[:word] references. ie. you can cite a specific paragraph "6", and optionally a specific word in the paragraph "6:10". Or possibly a triplet with mandatory separators - [chapter]:Paragraph:[word].
The paragraph references could be hard-coded into newly created epubs (for performance reasons.) And our ereaders can calculate the references during first open of older epubs which do not have them - the same way they try to paginate new docs now.
"Pages" were always a poor reference unit - which is why they're never used by academics. Page references are never consistent across different formats & printings, but, as long as the text hasn't changed significantly (eg. different editions), paragraph #s
are consistent - even between paper & electronic formats.
Troy