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Old 07-17-2013, 06:00 PM   #20
Hitch
Bookmaker & Cat Slave
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Posts: 11,503
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Device: K2, iPad, KFire, PPW, Voyage, NookColor. 2 Droid, Oasis, Boox Note2
Quote:
Originally Posted by st_albert View Post
Re: "frontmatter" in the ncx toc, here's my theory.

Any item that is in the toc (HTML? and/or NCX? -- ours are usually identical), but preceeds the "start reading location" is assumed to be frontmatter. This, like all good theories, is based on one anecdotal instance in which all the usual epub-like guide items are there (title page, copyright, dedication, etc.) but don't appear in either TOC, yet there was one item in the TOC (a map) which wasn't in the guide, of course, but did end up in frontmatter.

And by the way since I have a FireHD but don't have a Fire, I wonder whether the different behaviors are reflected in the Kindle emulator?

Albert
Hey, Albert:

Well, y'know, I don't think that the emulator reflects the differences, because we have the ncx versus html toc issue (the FireHD 8.98 uses the ncx, and the Fire doesn't; don't actually know factually about the Fire HD). What I care about is the inability to move frontmatter around as I see fit, or more importantly, as dictated by the client. As stated in my original rant about the frontmatter/toc issue, when we put an important Treasure Hunt clue (for real treasure, in the real world) in the frontmatter, prior to the TOC, Amazon stoutly refused--refused--to move the SRL to the clue page, (intro) where we'd put it.

We've basically determined to deal with it simply--not my nature, as you all know--and keep frontmatter frontmatter and put anything that "must be read" after the TOC. What I have fought against is trying to put the TOC first, because I think that reeks of amateursville, but, this "nothing before the TOC can be the SRL" issue is a PITA. On the other hand, Amazon just published a book of ours in which the top of every chapter is displaying all the first lines of the XHTML, so, isn't THAT fun? (They've been having major intake issues for days, with errors [=screaming clients, "what's wrong with my file!!!!"], so my hope is that once they've decided to stop improving whatever the freak needs "improving" this time, it will be fixed).

The issue I have is, sure, we all have to keep up with the latest this and that, but the Russian Roulette version of ebook-making (will this work on K4iPad THIS week?) is just really frustrating and worse, for me, expensive. I mean, it's like almost every book is the first book one's made, if you see what I'm saying; one bloody surprise after another. Still screwing around with image-crafting for images (like fluerons, or chapter-head images) that are not full-sized, to work on all Kindle devices perfectly. It's an endless battle.

Hitch
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