Quote:
Originally Posted by virtual_ink
Index
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An Index is particular tough in ePub as it is page oriented which does not lend itself to href entries. Href to a point in a web page scrolls to the exact location which is placed at the top of the page. ePub does not way the page rearranged in such a fashion so an Index can only point to the page in a similar way as to the page in a paper index except the page sizes on various devices are different so it becomes problematic.
ADE has virtual pages when are typically larger than screen pages and if used the index may link to a page that doesn't even have the text on the screen. If the href is capable of linking so that the screen containing the word is on the page then you user will still have to scan the page to find it. While this mimics the index operation of a paper book it seems unreasonable in this age of computers. The ideal solution would likely be to display the page and the show the word highlighted like it would be in a search. However, I know of no reader that works this way.
In addition the index would contain many many href's on the page, perhaps with a 2 or more column index you could have hundreds. The methods used by reader to select the index item isn't typically designed for hundreds of choices so would be overwhelmed.
I don't have the answers but these problems indicate that in ePub version 2 there is no good way to handle this. It is no better in ePub 3 I believe but perhaps there is time to address this need and get a better solution in the specs for epub 3. One solution would be to add an entry to the index that would identify the index entry and cause the reader to bring up the target page and enter a search on the page to highlight the word.
Dale