observation about ADE page numbers

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The "Goto page x" facility on the CyBook Opus definitely uses the ADE marginal page numbers for its "goto". If you goto page 123, it takes you to the page labelled "123" in the margin.

Yes, my EZ Reader seems to do that too in the normal case. How can you know for sure? Did you try a page-map file or a document with a page-map file and then remove a line?

Dale

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Yes, my EZ Reader seems to do that too in the normal case. How can you know for sure? Did you try a page-map file or a document with a page-map file and then remove a line?

Dale

No, I've just tried it in several of my ePub books, and in all of them, doing "goto page x" takes you to the page numbered "x" in the margin. It's certainly not "physical" pages on the reader, because on the Opus, a single "page number" generally spans about three page turns.

If anyone has an ePub with a page map file, I'll be happy to test it and see what it does on the Opus.

[Abecedary]

Originally Posted by HarryT

No, I've just tried it in several of my ePub books, and in all of them, doing "goto page x" takes you to the page numbered "x" in the margin. It's certainly not "physical" pages on the reader, because on the Opus, a single "page number" generally spans about three page turns.

If anyone has an ePub with a page map file, I'll be happy to test it and see what it does on the Opus.

Harry, I don't have my reader with me at work today, so I don't have the file near me. As I mentioned before, the only book I've come across that uses the page map is The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which I purchased from WHSmith. It's an interesting read, and certainly worth the ~£6 for it.

Something else to note. I finished the book last night and was pleasantly surprised to find that the full index was linked to the appropriate page numbers in the book. This is another slight advantage to having the ebook page numbers match those of the printed edition--you don't need to redo the entire index. It's a small advantage, and certainly of limited utility, but good to know that it's possible.

[frabjous]

Hey, it works!

This is unbelievably cool. Do you think there's any chance we can convince kovid or one of the other calibre folks to add support for creating one of these automatically via a kind of structure detection, as with chapters?

[Abecedary]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Hey, it works!

This is unbelievably cool. Do you think there's any chance we can convince kovid or one of the other calibre folks to add support for creating one of these automatically via a kind of structure detection, as with chapters?

Very doubtful. Kovid is of the mindset that we should eliminate any notion of a "page" (along with typography and basically anything that has its roots in printed media). Nevermind that if we eliminate the concept of a "page" that we'll end up replacing it with some other fairly arbitrary unit of measure (a la "locations" on a Kindle).

[frabjous]

Not just that... but as you noticed, when people are in a class, or any kind of discussion together, being able to refer to a given page is essential. In the eBook I'm working on, a revised edition of a philosophical classic (I'm an academic) I already had visible markers showing where the original page breaks are -- might as well make them work along with the software pagination.

In any case, so long as ADE is going to add these, we might as well have control over them.

[Abecedary]

Fully agreed. For a little more effort, you can add something that can make the book quite a bit more useful for certain groups of people. Just seeing you and Dale trying to incorporate this in some way makes me glad I mentioned it. I almost filed it away in my brain as just another one of those "hey, that's pretty cool" observations.

[frabjous]

I've been playing around with, and am having the same problem with roman numeral page numbers. I don't care so much about not being able to "go to" them, but, on my Sony, they do offset the numbers on the right, and the number shown at the bottom. If there are 7 pages with Roman numerals, if I type in "107" and click the browse button, I end up on page 100: it reads 100 on the right and 107 on the bottom.

Here's a warning from someone claiming that this extension should not be used, and may be deprecated:
http://groups.google.com/group/epubc...2994b3538ff687

It also, however, adds the tantalizing line, "As noted above, the same page mapping functionality is easily enabled
using the NCX <pageList> element, which is supported in EPUB. And I encourage reading system developers to support it." Anyone know anything about that?

I can attest that trying to play tricks with these things can make the ePub not function properly. I'd say more research is necessary.

Edit: AHA! Check this out:
http://www.epubbooks.com/blog/200812...-the-epub-ncx/

(Off to try it.)

Edit 2: Oops. I got over-excited there. I missed the part that reads:

I would like to add that although the above method IS valid against the NCX DTD, marking up pages numbers in this way has not yet been officially approved by the IDPF. It must also be noted that there are yet no reading systems that would utilize this information.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by frabjous

If there are 7 pages with Roman numerals, if I type in "107" and click the browse button, I end up on page 100: it reads 100 on the right and 107 on the bottom.

That's similar to what Acrobat Reader does with PDFs: it will show "100 (107 of 234)".

[HarryT]

So if you used a page map to number your pages 2, 4, 6, 8, ..., do you think that the "goto" function would still work as "1, 2, 3, 4, ..."? ie, doing a "goto page 5" would take you to the page labelled "10"?

[Jellby]

Well, here is a test book (The Picture of Dorian Gray) modified with a simple page-map. I just make each chapter a page, and named them: (empty) the cover, i-iii the title, contents and preface, and 1-20 the chapters. So there are 24 pages; in ADE the Preface is "iii (4/24)" and Chapter 10 is "10 (14/24)" (you can edit the "iii" and the "10").

How does it work in the Opus or in the Sonys?

(By the way, the "page-map" attribute makes the ePUB invalid.)

[Abecedary]

I did find an "official" mention of this in the Adobe EPUB Best Practices Guide. It's on page 19 under the Adobe Extensions section (along with info on the Layout Template). I agree that the implementation appears to be somewhat problematic, especially since there's no way to skip directly to a non-numbered page.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Well, here is a test book (The Picture of Dorian Gray) modified with a simple page-map. I just make each chapter a page, and named them: (empty) the cover, i-iii the title, contents and preface, and 1-20 the chapters. So there are 24 pages; in ADE the Preface is "iii (4/24)" and Chapter 10 is "10 (14/24)" (you can edit the "iii" and the "10").

How does it work in the Opus or in the Sonys?

(By the way, the "page-map" attribute makes the ePUB invalid.)

It works as I would have expected - "goto page 4" takes you to the preface, page 5 to chapter 1, etc.

The TOC entries all work fine.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It works as I would have expected - "goto page 4" takes you to the preface, page 5 to chapter 1, etc.

And do the page numbers at the margin agree with the page number in the status bar? i.e., Chapter 1 is page 5/24, but it is named "1", you should see a "1" in the right margin, do you see a "1" or a "5" in the status bar?

[HarryT]

There's a "1" in the margin, but a "5 of 24" on the status bar, so the "goto" is agreeing with the status bar numbers, not the margin numbers.