Quote:
Originally Posted by Doitsu
I don't think that there is a good solution for this. That's why you'll hardly find indexes in non-fiction ebooks. And those who have them often often contain useless straight to ebook copies with non-clickable page numbers.
BTW, many hardware ebook readers also have a hardware Back button that'll take the reader back to previous location.
I.e. you might not have to provide an explicit linking mechanism back to the list of index entries.
Of course, you could add a link that would take the reader back to the original index entry. (I.e. you'd have two <a> anchors in a row: one index link target and one index list href.)
But each page number could only have one of those links and, IMHO, adding visible page numbers in the middle of the text would somehow disturb the reading flow and moreover page numbers might be mistaken for end-notes.
IMHO, hidden page numbers are a better solution if you decide to implement an index.
Maybe you could convince the author and/or publisher to omit the index in the ebook edition altogether because of these technical issues. After all, an index is primarily only useful for users of a print edition, since ebook users could easily search for any word using search function of their ebook readers. |
Hi,
Thanks for your reply. I don't think there is going to be an elegant way of doing this.
I agree with you, we could dispense with an index altogether, since the text is searchable, unfortunately, academics use indexes extensively as a sort of glorified contents page to get to the area of interest and may not, necessarily, know what they are looking for. A good index gives a sort of overview of the text and the people, places and themes contained therein.
In the meantime, I think the best way to crack this is to give both options, ie, searchable text from the keywords they see in the index and also tag the original page number and, hopefully, using the "back" button function to get back to the index if necessary.
In this case how would I implement the <a id="xxx"/> tag within an <a href ...> tag?
Many thanks,
John.