feelings on .epub ?

[aapezzuto]

wow, battle of the footnotes....

footnotes and pagenation are questions of hardware/software implementation... The only real bearing I can see they would have on assessing a format is deciding if it is asking to much from the current technology. I dont like the idea of every reader/software starts storing its short cuts and work arounds in my files... let it create a parallel file that it can get rid of at its leisure... The last thing i need when cleaning up my computer is to have to open every book i own and sweep out the extra stuff from the junk drawer.

with foot notes the real end all question is... how picky are you about exactly how it looks... because if you want perfect control, you will need a human overseeing it... use pdf... if you don't care exactly how it works its a much easier task...

so at the heart of this, has the argument become .epub is a decent format... a little new to have good support, and it is/isn't reasonable for low power computing devices natively?

[jbenny]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Making a pop up footnote in this case makes more sense since it need not be allowed for in the document pagination.

...

Specific to footnotes - Where should footnotes go? end of page, end of chapter, end of book? Is links enough with a return capability?

...

Dale

Yes, popups for footnotes and word definitions would probably be the most workable solution, without getting into the complexities of page reformatting on the reader. However, as I mentioned above, the two CSS properties needed to make a popup work are not required by the OPS spec. And as I have seen, DE did not implement them.

Even links to a footnote may not work. Again, as I have noted elsewhere, DE does not have a "Back" button, or any way to return from a hyperlink jump. The OPS spec doesn't seem to address this directly, although support for the <a> tag is required. It seems an oversight that Adobe would leave out a "Back" button. I have tried three other methods to implement the "Back" button functionality. All of them work in a browser, but one method doesn't work at all in DE and the other two take me to the very beginning of the file, not back to where I came from. I see this a a problem with DE and not with epub itself.

[IceHand]

There's also the option to not display page numbers at all, but instead use a progress bar and/or percentage. I know, not the best way to handle this problem, but it certainly would be a workaround.

Edit: Oh, I just saw that this has been mentioned already

[jbenny]

Originally Posted by aapezzuto

wow, battle of the footnotes....

footnotes and pagenation are questions of hardware/software implementation... The only real bearing I can see they would have on assessing a format is deciding if it is asking to much from the current technology. I dont like the idea of every reader/software starts storing its short cuts and work arounds in my files... let it create a parallel file that it can get rid of at its leisure... The last thing i need when cleaning up my computer is to have to open every book i own and sweep out the extra stuff from the junk drawer.

with foot notes the real end all question is... how picky are you about exactly how it looks... because if you want perfect control, you will need a human overseeing it... use pdf... if you don't care exactly how it works its a much easier task...

so at the heart of this, has the argument become .epub is a decent format... a little new to have good support, and it is/isn't reasonable for low power computing devices natively?

I think that as far as the epub spec goes right now, it is an improvement over OEB. It is also good in the fact that several major players were behind its development (with some notable exceptions).

As far as rendering on small devices, I don't think that it will be any more difficult than current formats that are based on OEB. In fact, it may be easier, since the structure of XHTML 1.1 is more stringent and it has dropped several old HTML tags.

Since epub is designed to be reflowable, we don't need the restrictions of a fixed format like PDF. However, there does need to be some easy, standardized way to display footnotes and such. I think this is one area where the OPS spec needs improvement.

[andym]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

I don't mean just rendering performance, I also mean pagination performance. I know for example that SONY's LRF layout routine is extremely fragile. I can easily create LRF files that are correct, but cause the reader to reset because it runs out of memory. And LRF is really, really simple compared to HTML.

And pagination takes a hell of along time for larger books. You wont notice this if you use connect, but if you transfer directly to a reader, then the hit is significant. I've often had to wait for upto 15mins for the reader to finish pagination.

Mobipocket handles html perfectly well (though on Windows Mobile devices it still only supports a limited subset of the epub standard - eg very limited support for stylesheets) repagination is excellent.

Until there's an reader that will read epub on a pda my vote is going to have to be 'I'll wait and see'.

Surely the most sensible user-friendly way to show a footnote (unless you are dealing with citations in an academic text) is with the title attribute and a tooltip?

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by andym

Mobipocket handles html perfectly well (though on Windows Mobile devices it still only supports a limited subset of the epub standard - eg very limited support for stylesheets) repagination is excellent.

I am surprised you say repagination is excellent. It doesn't even do repagination on PDA's. Perhaps you are saying it is fast because you don't know what pagination is doing. It is fast because it doesn't do any work. It does not compute the pages in the document at all. It only shows the size and a percentage of how far you have read on the bar at the bottom. It cannot predict when the next chapter will start. If you jump to a new chapter and then backup you will end up with a different looking page than if you approach the page in the forward direction.

My understanding is that the version for Linux does do pagination but I have not observed this version. The Linux version does not do bookmarks I am told. Bookmarks are related to pagination in that, in a real book, you bookmark pages while MobiPocket bookmarks a place in the file by distance.

Dale

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by andym

Surely the most sensible user-friendly way to show a footnote (unless you are dealing with citations in an academic text) is with the title attribute and a tooltip?

That's assuming your device has some sort of mouse interface and that the footnote is small, which is not always the case, for e.g. the SONY Reader. I think hyperlinks are more robust.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

That's assuming your device has some sort of mouse interface and that the footnote is small, which is not always the case, for e.g. the SONY Reader. I think hyperlinks are more robust.

Pop-ups are neat if you have some sort of touch screen or a mouse. For dedicated e-ink readers, displaying footnotes in the footer or a hyperlink should work a lot better.

I agree with kovidgoyal on this.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Pop-ups are neat if you have some sort of touch screen or a mouse. For dedicated e-ink readers, displaying footnotes in the footer or a hyperlink should work a lot better.

Even though I have an iLiad and could click a link to get a popup or a hyperlink, I'd rather just see the footnote below the paragraph it relates to, personally. I guess that's because I'm thinking about fiction authors like Terry Pratchett and Jonathan Stroud, who use footnotes extensively. For academic purposes, endnotes with hyperlinks would be fine. (How would you activate a hyperlink on something like the Sony Reader?)

[kovidgoyal]

A footnote at the end of a paragraph is just another paragraph with special formatting. So why call it a footnote at all?

[jbenny]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Pop-ups are neat if you have some sort of touch screen or a mouse. For dedicated e-ink readers, displaying footnotes in the footer or a hyperlink should work a lot better.

I agree with kovidgoyal on this.

Hyperlinks are the easiest to create and the least trouble for the reader to deal with. Now, if only DE had a "Back" button, so we could return from that hyperlink jump. Hopefully, when Adobe ports DE to the Sony, they will fix this oversight (and also fix it in the Windows version).

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by jbenny

Hyperlinks are the easiest to create and the least trouble for the reader to deal with. Now, if only DE had a "Back" button, so we could return from that hyperlink jump. Hopefully, when Adobe ports DE to the Sony, they will fix this oversight (and also fix it in the Windows version).

Well, on the Sony you always have a "Back" button. No fix needed.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Well, on the Sony you always have a "Back" button. No fix needed.

Just because there is a button labeled back does not mean that the software will know what to do with it.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Just because there is a button labeled back does not mean that the software will know what to do with it.

Hopefully it will, or else it would be very poorly designed ^_^

Oh and don't expect Adobe DE on the Sony PRS to be anything like the desktop version. To run on such a device it should be an almost complete rewrite.

[jbenny]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Hopefully it will, or else it would be very poorly designed ^_^

Well, the Windows version is already poorly designed, since it is missing that functionality. Any bets on whether they make the same mistake on the Sony?