[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by phossler

Is the 'dead tree' approach of putting footnotes at the bottom of the page or putting endnotes at the end of the chapter the best way for an ebook?

Currently, there are two main ways of doing footnotes:

• In a separate Footnotes chapter
• As "endnotes" at the end of each chapter (this is the method I use)

A separate footnotes chapter might have the advantage in:

• Matching the original look of the book (if it has its own separate footnote chapter)
• Allowing users to easily skip this chapter all together
  • Side Note: There is important information in footnotes!!!! The author/editor would have never put them in in the first place!

When I first started, I matched whatever the original book used, but I have drifted towards using my hammer to bash all footnotes into the end of each chapter method for multiple reasons:

• The reading device does not need to load a completely different file
  • On older devices, such as my original Nook, there is quite a delay when loading separate HTML files.
  • This made the book feel extremely sluggish when jumping back/forth between footnotes.
• If the physical book had an extremely large separate footnotes chapter, it may pass the ~300 KB filesize limit.
  • Spreading the footnotes throughout the book in each chapter made hitting the filesize limit MUCH less likely.
  • Spreading footnotes at the end of each chapter also allowed me to make all ebooks use the same consistent code.
• Much simpler code
  • Yes yes, I know it would be more robust to include the filename in every link, but that would be a complete pain to Regex and I am lazy.
    • In my case, I would have to change my "id" format to include chapter numbers so there is no overlap:
    • Text in "Chapter 2": <a href="../Text/Footnotes.xhtml#fn2.1" id="ft2.1">[1]</a>
    • Footnote in "Footnote chapter": <p><a href="../Text/02.xhtml#ft2.1" id="fn2.1">[1]</a>
• In my specific case, a lot of the books I convert might be posted directly to a website as a blog post.
  • Having a separate footnotes chapter would make posting "Chapter 1" "Chapter 2" "Chapter 3" a complete pain in the butt.
    • You would have to go to the Footnotes chapter, copy/paste the Footnotes to the bottom of the post, and edit all the links.
    • Currently you can just copy/paste the HTML and do a few minor tweaks.

I have seen mention of it on the boards, some users decide to stick a "jump past footnotes" link at the beginning of the footnotes. This will jump you right to the next chapter.

[...]

<p>Chapter 1 Text Chapter 1 Text Chapter 1 Text Chapter 1 Text</p>

<hr/>

<p><a href="../Text/02.xhtml">[JUMP TO CHAPTER 2]</a></p>

  <p><a href="#ft1" id="fn1">[1]</a> Chapter 1 Footnote 1 Chapter 1 Footnote 1 Chapter 1 Footnote 1 Chapter 1 Footnote 1</p>

  <p><a href="#ft2" id="fn2">[2]</a> Chapter 1 Footnote 2 Chapter 1 Footnote 2 Chapter 1 Footnote 2 Chapter 1 Footnote 2</p>

[...]

Originally Posted by phossler

Most of the time I see the endnotes at the end of the chapter technique used, and I always felt it was a little 'awkward' to navigate to and back.

I personally have no problem just "clicking through" all the footnotes if I have no interest in reading them... sort of like if you were reading a physical book you go into "lala land" and skip to the next page.

Originally Posted by phossler

For an ebook would it be more appropriate to somehow make the footnoted material inline and set off with a distinctive style?

I just did a search and see that Liz Castro's site has an example of it working in iBooks:

http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/20...pub-3-and.html

And there was recently an image that was posted of "pop up" footnotes potentially being on the newest Kindle.

In future formats, there will most likely be a standard way to do "pop up" footnotes. If you are creating the EPUB for personal usage, your device supports it, and/or you are creating it for a very limited audience (iBooks only), then go right ahead.

This is also another reason I stress code consistency, when future formats/methods do come around, if all of your footnotes are done exactly the same way, it will be easy as pie to implement any changes that are required.

For work, I create a "one EPUB to rule them all" which then gets converted to a Kindle version as well. If you are doing this professionally, you have to keep in mind the old Kindles/devices, so you need good fallback code. The old Kindle cannot handle fancy CSS, so a distinctive style or floating box would most likely be out of the question.

If you create separate EPUBs taking advantage of quirks in each of the devices/readers, then you can have fun creating 5+ different versions of the same book.

And your problem of "skipping the footnotes" becomes even more of a complete pain if you actually stick the footnotes inline. Inline footnotes easily become unwieldy when footnotes are more than a sentence.

Feel free to post examples/pictures of inline footnotes that you believe work well. I personally have never seen them work well.

(I have turned into an angry typographer... MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY )

Originally Posted by phossler

Obviously customer and house rules are correct, even when they're not.

Luckily I am the one creating the "house rules" at work. My mentality = minimal code (much less chance of anything breaking on all the different devices, and doesn't get in the way of readers) + consistency (easy as pie in the future to change things if needed).

Originally Posted by phossler

Hope this is not off topic

Discussion is good. It is also great when other people give input in what they do as well. We are all here to make high quality ebooks, and we all learn/absorb from eachother.