Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Not really, just add special CSS class say "epub_footnote" then the layout engine renders the contents of the footnote in a block, checks if the block fits on the current page, if yes, adds it to the bottom if no puts it on the footnote stack for the next page. Shouldn't significantly change the rendering complexity.
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This is not as simple as you say if the book is large and the layout engine is pre-paginating the entire document. It would have to scan the document and find every instance of a footnote and adjust as needed. This could take a long time for a ebook reader with its limited processor to do. People are already complaining about the start up time for a book. Making a pop up footnote in this case makes more sense since it need not be allowed for in the document pagination.
We may need to take a look at the pagination requirement and determine what is really needed. How important is knowing the last page number of a book? How important is knowing the page number of the next chapter in a book? Are these essential features?
Specific to footnotes - Where should footnotes go? end of page, end of chapter, end of book? Is links enough with a return capability?
It is interesting to look at MobiPocket on a PDA. They only provide a percentage of the book progress bar and links to chapter starts. They do not currently paginate the book but instead remember a few pagination points for previous pages so you can back up a little (5 pages I believe). This is because they provide all sorts of font sizes and the user can change them at any time. The ebook standards limit the font choices to 7 sizes so this can help a little and you can likely limit the initial pagination to a subset of those but it is still something to look at.
Dale