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charleski · 07-03-2011, 01:50 PM

Well, take a look at any printed book - they don't include ToC entries for purely functional front matter elements like the title and copyright pages, and there's no reason for ebooks to be different. An introduction, foreword or author's note (i.e. something the reader might actually want to read) is different. Also, remember that people might chose to read this on their phone, and it's annoying to have to scroll past irrelevant fluff in the ToC in order to find the entries linking to the text you want.

All ePub readers can generate a ToC from the structure defined in the ePub, and it's usually far easier to access this (generally 1 or 2 clicks) than find an xhtml version at the front of the book. The only real reason to lay out a separate ToC is if you want one in which the chapters have substantial subtitles or additional text that wouldn't be appropriate for the generated ToC. Otherwise it's really just an unnecessary hold-over from print (in most cases they're included simply because the inferior Kindle format requires one).

Editing the file and removing the needless <p class="break" /> lines would certainly be a good idea in the long-run.

I learnt the basics of CSS from some web tutorials, and got the rest from playing around and reading posts here. I've looked at several books, but most are too long-winded and prone to pad things out in order to make themselves look more impressive. It's all really very simple, especially as there's no need to do anything really complex with the css selectors.

InDesign has been promising it would be useful for ePub creation since CS3. I could forgive the earlier attempts since it was still new to the process, but this is now the fourth version that claims to produce epubs and it still fails at certain basic elements. Text indents should always be specified in em, yet InDesign insists on using an absolute measure (pixels). The same goes for paragraph margins. Anyone who knows the basics about typography as applied to reflowable formats knows this, yet the engineers at Adobe can't be bothered to make the core changes that would be needed to allow InDesign to work properly for reflowable rather than fixed formats. On the other hand, they now allow you to specify the page margin in ems, which means the area devoted to text on the screen shrinks as you enlarge the font - this is just insane! (At least you're allowed to change this to use an absolute measure.) It all just gives the feeling that it's been designed by people who've never really sat down and thought through the things needed to produce a decent ebook, instead we get fluff like the ability to add <video> tags. For a program that's marketed and priced as a professional tool this is no longer satisfactory.

07-03-2011, 01:50 PM	#4
charleski Wizard Posts: 1,196 Karma: 1281258 Join Date: Sep 2009 Device: PRS-505	Well, take a look at any printed book - they don't include ToC entries for purely functional front matter elements like the title and copyright pages, and there's no reason for ebooks to be different. An introduction, foreword or author's note (i.e. something the reader might actually want to read) is different. Also, remember that people might chose to read this on their phone, and it's annoying to have to scroll past irrelevant fluff in the ToC in order to find the entries linking to the text you want. All ePub readers can generate a ToC from the structure defined in the ePub, and it's usually far easier to access this (generally 1 or 2 clicks) than find an xhtml version at the front of the book. The only real reason to lay out a separate ToC is if you want one in which the chapters have substantial subtitles or additional text that wouldn't be appropriate for the generated ToC. Otherwise it's really just an unnecessary hold-over from print (in most cases they're included simply because the inferior Kindle format requires one). Editing the file and removing the needless <p class="break" /> lines would certainly be a good idea in the long-run. I learnt the basics of CSS from some web tutorials, and got the rest from playing around and reading posts here. I've looked at several books, but most are too long-winded and prone to pad things out in order to make themselves look more impressive. It's all really very simple, especially as there's no need to do anything really complex with the css selectors. InDesign has been promising it would be useful for ePub creation since CS3. I could forgive the earlier attempts since it was still new to the process, but this is now the fourth version that claims to produce epubs and it still fails at certain basic elements. Text indents should always be specified in em, yet InDesign insists on using an absolute measure (pixels). The same goes for paragraph margins. Anyone who knows the basics about typography as applied to reflowable formats knows this, yet the engineers at Adobe can't be bothered to make the core changes that would be needed to allow InDesign to work properly for reflowable rather than fixed formats. On the other hand, they now allow you to specify the page margin in ems, which means the area devoted to text on the screen shrinks as you enlarge the font - this is just insane! (At least you're allowed to change this to use an absolute measure.) It all just gives the feeling that it's been designed by people who've never really sat down and thought through the things needed to produce a decent ebook, instead we get fluff like the ability to add <video> tags. For a program that's marketed and priced as a professional tool this is no longer satisfactory.