Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
As a practical matter I often find that unambiguous identifiers in the source *text* itself work "well enough". For instance, "the paragraph after figure 3" or the "introductory text of section X".
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True, but as Patricia alluded to, the Humanities usually require more precise references, and rarely have images. The method you're describing would be ... problematic when sourcing a quote from say,
Great Expectations, for instance.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
The problem with line numbering is that the number of lines depends on screen size/font size with a reflowable format. Paragraph numbers might work though assuming the referenced document semantically identifies paragraphs.
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You make an excellent point. Line numbers may continue to be useful for things with short, fixed line lengths, such as poetry, but will probably be less useful for more flexible formats. They
might could still work out if they were parsed from a fixed format, and applied where ever they showed up in the reflowed one. They usually only
mark every fifth or tenth line, anyway, rather than putting an explicit number on each line. Still it's problematic.
Paragraph numbers would seem to be the better choice for text reference, as paragraph 33 will always be paragraph 33, no matter how many "screens" it takes to get to it or display it.
Most of the things that would need to be referenced this way would have identifiable paragraphs.
I suppose that it could be as simple as establishing an e-referencing standard such as formatting the e-text to an established page size, font and margin parameters, i.e. A4, 2.5 cm margins all around, in Arial 10 pt font. Then your references would be to the text in that "standard" formatting.
A cleverly programmed reading software could even internalize that parsing and report the "official" page number of the current page or a selected piece of text upon request. But we're talking
not the currently designed hardware here, of course. Well, except the iLiad, it could likely be programmed to do this.