[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I'm converting a book with extensive notes for each chapter. Some of the notes are several pages long. I'd like some advice on the best way to deal with that. The easy option is "make the notes into their own chapter, with maybe a link from each note in the main text to the individual note at the end." But I'm not sure how the reader gets back to the main text then; will I need to put in a special "return" link, or is there a way to set that up automatically?

As DaleDe says, not all readers have a "back" function. The Cybooks have, ADE doesn't. That is, in my opinion, a serious usability flaw. But not supporting links is even worse. But my advice is do not degrade the book quality just to cater for flawed readers which should have never existed. My option would be something like this book, with all notes at the end (with a separate chapter for each chapter's notes, because there are so many), and with return links (multiple, if the footnote is referenced in multiple places).

Are there simple, automated ways to set this up, or does it involve extensive hand-coding of the HTML?

Maybe you can use some HTML editor that makes it easy. I believe Sigil does not have the hyperlink editor yet, but it may help when it does. Anyway, it can be done with some good text editor and a couple of regexes, provided the initial file is not a complete mess.

Secondary question, not related: Is there any reason not to use jpgs for images? This book only has a couple of images, so I'm not worried if I should be making multiple image types for different ebook formats, but the next book I've got in line has potentially many images.

As a general rule, use JPG for photographs or pictures with many colour changes. For pictures with a few plain colours (screenshots, line figures, graphs...) use PNG (or GIF), they will usually compress better and the JPG artifacts are quite visible here.

Don't add unnecessary weight to the pictures. If they are all grayscale, make sure they are defined so (in Photoshop, Gimp, or similar). Don't use very high quality in the JPG compression (high quality = large file) if not needed. If you are working from a scan, with a white background, make sure it is really white, and not some grayish spotted thing.