Well, as a lot of people seem to prefer per chapter and relative numbering, I've told myself "Well, DO try it for a time, maybe you are just not used to it and that's all".
OK so I've dissabled
Full Book Page Numbers and then I've discovered
ANOTHER related issue in this case with the navigation bar. And, as I will try to explain, it is also related to the support of nested ToCs.
The issue arises when you have
html files which include several "subchapters". (Normally each chapter in a book is a different html file. But it is also completely normal if one file contains several chapters, usually because they are "subchapters").
I explain the issue with an example. I'm currently reading a long book called "Las Legiones Malditas" (title translated to English: The Cursed Legions, and yes, it's a historical novel about Romans). This novel is split in books and then in chapters. (If you prefer, think about "The Lord of the Rings" and its six books and then its chapters).
The "Las Legiones Malditas" epub has the following structure:
- Each book is a different html file.
- In each book, its title is a <h1> heading.
- Each chapter is included in its parent book html file. There are no different files for each chapter.
- Each chapter title is a <h2> heading.
- toc.ncx is also built following this structure. It's a nested ToC with 2 levels. The parent <navpoint>s link to books and the child <navpoint>s link to chapters.
- Just in case it's important somehow although I suppose it's fully irrelevant. Of course, child <navpoint>s, (the chapter ones, the h2 ones), need anchor links as they refer to positions in the middle of the html file. (So they are all like <content src="Text/Legion-7.xhtml#toc-anchor-1"/>). But parent <navpoint>s, (the book ones, the h1 ones), could have gone with just a link to the html file as they are always in the beginning of the file. But nevertheless, they also use anchor points.
Well then the incoherences I get are:
- In the footer of the book I get the known "Chapter whatever - Page xx of xx". I intentionally say chapter, because I do get the h2 titles (well telling the whole truth, the <navLavel> of their associated ToC <navpoint>).
- But in the navigation bar, if I press << or >> I don't go to the next chapter but to the previous/next book (which is the previous/next html file). Am I the only one who sees a little incoherency here?
- And this situation is worsened if I disable the undocumented and not-officially supported Full Book Page Numbering. Because in the Kobo default page numbering (per chapter), the navigation bar ONLY covers the current chapter. Do you see the problem? There's no way to jump to the next/previous chapter, because << or >> jumps to the next/previous book and the navigation bar is limited to my current chapter.
- I've told a little white lie. You can actually jump to the next chapter through the Table of Contents. But as Kobo flattens it, you have a mess of entries. (In this book with just two levels of hierarchy, I already have TEN pages of ToC).