Quote:
Originally Posted by jbenny
Since it seems we all agree that paragraph numbers are probably the best we can do with today's reflowable ebook formats, we still have the question of how to use them without making them too obnoxious and in-your-face to the average reader.
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In business use the number looks something like 1.1.1 where the dots are used to separate the levels with a variable number of dots and the least significant (one on the right) number is the paragraph number. Section numbers have less depth.
To find such a paragraph there needs to be a goto menu item same as used today to goto a page number.
To display this data really is a reader issue and there can be no predefined method to do it. In some documents it is setting at the start of the paragraph as a lead in. Professional tools like Framemaker can auto generate a document like this. It could be display as a optional setting in the control panel and turned on or off as needed by the user. If the device has a touch screen it can be implemented as a tap or gesture. For menu driven systems it could be done by selecting a menu item which would then display the number based on the cursor location and up/down arrows could be used to move the cursor location by paragraph.
As you can see there is no best way to implement the viewing but the idea that it exists is what has to be sold so that the tool can figure out that they need to do it. The database is likely to need to include a reference similar to the pre-pagination I have mentioned before so it does need to be in the standard.
Dale