Footnote problem in kepub conversion

[Liudprand]

There are two separate things going on here, which I think have become confused.

1. Your recommendation. I'm happy to believe it works in the way you say. I will send you an email address, as I'll be interested to have a look at what you mean. But I simply didn't understand the instructions as presented - which I'd like to make clear, at the risk of repeating myself to the point of tedium - I'm sure is a deficiency in my education in these matters, rather than in your instructions themselves.

2. When I say "industry standard", I mean that's what several clients, over quite a few years, have expected me to deliver - which I've in the past done via InDesign. The point isn't that it's my personal preference (though it is); the point is that I have to deliver to my clients what they ask for - and everyone I've done work for wants notes formatted meeting the two specifications I've outlined several times now. In addition, I can't find a book published by any of the most prestigious/well-known publishers - or, indeed, any book at all, though there must be some - that doesn't work according to those specifications. That's all I meant by "industry standard". If you dislike the term, then I'm not wedded to it; call it whatever you like. Thinking about it, I may have seen a few that use "[1]", rather than a superscript "1" - but it's not that common, and I personally have NEVER been asked to format notes in an ebook that way.

Since I've been doing this work for a few years in InDesign, but can manage most of what I need without using InDesign now - except for this one stubborn issue - I was hoping/assuming there was a way of achieving it that didn't require getting into coding terminology - which, for the absolute avoidance of doubt, I am not competent with. I was hoping, in other words, that there was some way of achieving it just using the GUI-like features of the various software out there.

As I say, if you have any counter-examples - books you can point me to on Amazon, with a free sample that shows notes in chapters other than the first that are numbered in sequence throughout the book and/or highlight more than (yes!) a superscript note cue, and none of the surrounding text, I'd be interested to see it.

Once again, thanks for your help, and I'll endeavour to find some way of mugging up on the necessary terminology so that I can understand it.

In the meantime, I will indeed send you a PM with my email.

[Quoth]

You do have to deliver what clients ask for, though I try to educate when it's obviously wrong.
I've no problem with the note placement and numbering you want. That's easy.

The link style that looks like regular text with a superscript [x] makes it work in the real world and gives the paper-wedded clients what they expect to see.

I've a bunch of stuff to do, but I'll send several docx samples soonish.

No-one needs Indesign for ebooks and often not for paper books now. I abandoned DTP maybe in 2005 (InDesign is just traditional DTP fudged to do ebooks also).

Do you actually have a real ereader?
How many of these clients use apps on phones or real ereaders?

[theducks]

Knowing when (and how) to abandon some of the TadPub styles is important.

I have books that the whitespace before a chapter head is almost 25% on my Libra2 (a huge screen compared to many phones) and another 25% after
(I have saved searches that shrink that to 6%, keeping some sense of a chapter head block). Other things I see: 2em chapter heads.those only fit if ONLY numbers.

I only re-code for myself. Ans I have been doing this for almost 13Y.
FWIW I started with a 5" RMSDK based device whe there wer block number on the right edge that smeared the last letters of text when the showed.
My solution was to adjust the body margins and text size:
The right margin gave it room for 3 digits
by raising the text size, it became larger relative to the numbers. The pros have tricks that are needed to work on less compliant devices.(Kobo is a friendly device to code for)

body {
    margin-top: 0;
    margin-bottom: 0;
    margin-left: 2pt;
    margin-right: 16pt;
    font-size: 1.2em;
    text-align: justify;
    }

[Liudprand]

Thanks again. I'll dm my email in a bit (I'm out and about).

Mine is a Kobo Libra 2. I checked the top 10 nonfiction books I have on there (i.e. the 10 most recently opened), and they all have the formatting I'm talking about, displaying correctly. But I'm not sure how they all show up on a phone or tablet.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Liudprand

<snop>

2. When I say "industry standard", I mean that's what several clients, over quite a few years, have expected me to deliver - which I've in the past done via InDesign. The point isn't that it's my personal preference (though it is); the point is that I have to deliver to my clients what they ask for - and everyone I've done work for wants notes formatted meeting the two specifications I've outlined several times now. In addition, I can't find a book published by any of the most prestigious/well-known publishers - or, indeed, any book at all, though there must be some - that doesn't work according to those specifications.

Here's one such, sort of… the print edition of Charlotte Gordon's "Romantic Outlaws" published by Random House has 50+ pages of bibliographic notes that are referenced by page number and a snippet of text, e.g.

3 William Godwin did not think… Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2989), 26

There are no cues in the text! I doubt the ebook edition is any different.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Romantic-O.../dp/B00RKX0R5S

Aside - when they hide the relevant text 'popup' notes can be very irritating, even more so if there are multiple notes for the same paragraph that need to be read together. I often extract the notes to a separate file and put it on another device.

BR

[Liudprand]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Here's one such, sort of… the print edition of Charlotte Gordon's "Romantic Outlaws" published by Random House has 50+ pages of bibliographic notes that are referenced by page number and a snippet of text, e.g.

3 William Godwin did not think… Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2989), 26

There are no cues in the text! I doubt the ebook edition is any different.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Romantic-O.../dp/B00RKX0R5S

Aside - when they hide the relevant text 'popup' notes can be very irritating, even more so if there are multiple notes for the same paragraph that need to be read together. I often extract the notes to a separate file and put it on another device.

BR

Yes, that's interesting. That's a style that's used quite often - I think it's considered a bit less offputting by publishers who don't like too much clutter on the (printed) page, and think that lots of people are put off by footnote/endnote cues as forbiddingly "academic."

One ebook I have using that format has one-way links - from the notes section, but no link from the text to the note, which seems to corroborate your hunch. Doesn't seem very satisfactory to me.

[BetterRed]

But, Charlotte Dawson is an academic - Professor at Endicott College, Boston MA

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Liudprand

2. When I say "industry standard", I mean that's what several clients, over quite a few years, have expected me to deliver - which I've in the past done via InDesign.

See also https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...postcount=1709

[Liudprand]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

But, Charlotte Dawson is an academic - Professor at Endicott College, Boston MA

Indeed. All the more reason to disguise that fact in the marketing and production, if you want to sell more books! To be fair, most readers of a book like that would have no objection to her being an academic - but they will often be turned off by anything signalling that the book is written in an academic style, and (especially) that the writer and publisher are keen to communicate the book's academic good standing. (There are readers who actually respond positively to the kind of impenetrable and self-important prose that academics are too often guilty of producing, but they're much fewer in number.)

[Liudprand]

Originally Posted by Quoth

See also https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...postcount=1709

Yes, I agree with that. But I also think one of the reasons is that the tools for producing ebooks are not yet user-friendly enough for people to casually play around with different style/formatting options in a way that would allow the industry practice to evolve more rapidly.

Mind you, I think I'll go to my grave with my preference for the traditional look and feel of superscript footnotes!

[Liudprand]

Originally Posted by Liudprand

Yes, I agree with that. But I also think one of the reasons is that the tools for producing ebooks are not yet user-friendly enough for people to casually play around with different style/formatting options in a way that would allow the industry practice to evolve more rapidly.

Mind you, I think I'll go to my grave with my preference for the traditional look and feel of superscript footnotes!

Also, along with that preference, I have another one that ebooks don't yet seem able to satisfy: the use of text (or "old-style") figures in body-text. I had a disagreement with someone on here a while ago who thought they were ugly, but I feel exactly the opposite. There's a workaround, in the sense that some typefaces (e.g. Georgia) use text figures as standard; but I don't like Georgia, so that doesn't help me.

[Liudprand]

In fact, there are a lot of things that I often think ebooks should be able to do that, as far as I know, they still can't. This is in danger of straying off-topic, I guess, so I'll confine myself to one. It seems obvious to me that chapter headings and subheadings should be treated differently from body-text, in the sense that, if you increase the font size on your device, that doesn't mean that you want the headings to become so large and cumbersome that a single word - "Acknowledgements", or whatever - grows so large that it goes over a single line. So, one solution (I've no idea how easy it would be to actualize) would be for headings to vary, when you change the font size, within much narrower parameters (so, for every five points the main text changes, the headings change by one point, or something); and with a hard maximum on their size, so that they don't go over a line. The handling of headings - e.g. the failure, usually, for them to be centred in kepub files even when they're originally formatted as centred - is one of the things that, I think, makes a lot of publishing-industry people basically ignore ebooks until the technology has improved.

[ps67]

Originally Posted by Liudprand

In fact, there are a lot of things that I often think ebooks should be able to do that, as far as I know, they still can't. This is in danger of straying off-topic, I guess, so I'll confine myself to one. It seems obvious to me that chapter headings and subheadings should be treated differently from body-text, in the sense that, if you increase the font size on your device, that doesn't mean that you want the headings to become so large and cumbersome that a single word - "Acknowledgements", or whatever - grows so large that it goes over a single line. So, one solution (I've no idea how easy it would be to actualize) would be for headings to vary, when you change the font size, within much narrower parameters (so, for every five points the main text changes, the headings change by one point, or something); and with a hard maximum on their size, so that they don't go over a line.

About font size I don't agree with You. The obvious solution is to set the size of headings not too much greater than normal text so when the reader increases the size of the font on the device the size of headings won't be too large.

Originally Posted by Liudprand

The handling of headings - e.g. the failure, usually, for them to be centred in kepub files even when they're originally formatted as centred - is one of the things that, I think, makes a lot of publishing-industry people basically ignore ebooks until the technology has improved.

As far as I know kepub centers headings when they are centered in the original epub. In this forum there are people much more skilled than me but I have never encountered that issue.

ps: about old-style numbers I don't agree with You again but the important thing is that You shouldn't force the reader to see them. A Ebook is not a printed book: the reader have the choice about font (and line spacing, margins etc.) Who likes them can use a font with old-style numbers and who doesn't like them can use a font without them. There are font variants in some font but it is a complicated matter and they are rarely supported by ereaders or app.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by ps67

About font size I don't agree with You. The obvious solution is to set the size of headings not too much greater than normal text so when the reader increases the size of the font on the device the size of headings won't be too large.

You don't like headings set to 600%? :‑J

Originally Posted by ps67

As far as I know kepub centers headings when they are centered in the original epub. In this forum there are people much more skilled than me but I have never encountered that issue.

When reading a kepub, in the Aa menu => Justification, if you select left aligned or centered, that will override center/right alignment on headers/images/etc. If you leave it set to off, the ebook's style will work. Oddly one of the few settings on a Kobo ereader that will override the ebook's styles.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Liudprand

Yes, I agree with that. But I also think one of the reasons is that the tools for producing ebooks are not yet user-friendly enough for people to casually play around with different style/formatting options in a way that would allow the industry practice to evolve more rapidly.

Really?
Decent free tools are well over 10 years old and much easier to use and better output than Indesign for ebooks, Indesign is a nearly 40 year old concept. Lack of competence and training in the publishing companies is the problem.

It's actually easier than producing a complex paper publication if you know what you are doing.

Sadly @Hitch and I still see Word docs produced as if it's a glass typewriter or Wordstar in 1978 on CP/M. You can't know the horror of it if it's only seen on paper, though paper book publishing is not as high quality as 100 years ago when there were no tools except Linotype (c.1890s) and competitors (c.1914).
The Victorian typewriter only resulted in legible MSS and soon carbon copies and stencils (Gestetner & mimeograph).
Early CRT editors were actually based on teletype systems (see edlin) and then wordprocessing came later to PCs with direct formatting on CP/M and DOS, but had been on minicomputers and dedicated machines earlier. Wordprocessing with Outlining and Styles is over 20 years old, but many people just use the default settings and click on direct formatting as if it's just a graphical version of the late 1960s minicomputer text editors.