Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
While the pop-up notes "look" cool, in truth, it's not that dramatically different to the reader. When you say "rather than constantly jumping back and forth in the text," I, as a reader, don't find it that way and I read a lot of non-fiction material that's heavily annotated, footnoted, etc. You simply click the footnote number (or asterisk, or whatever item is used to indicate the link), you're pretty instantly taken to the footnote, you read it, click the number to return to where you were reading, and bob's-yer-uncle.
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Thanks, Hitch, you actually convinced me about this -- in fact, it all seems so absurdly obvious to me now, I guess I was caught up in the "looks cool" aspect of it all, and
thought that it would somehow make things easier/better for the reader, but I can see now that it really doesn't make all that much difference.
I just have a couple of questions/scenarios about this -- naturally I could try this myself to see if it works on my iPad2, but I don't have any other devices so I'm not sure what happens for each of these cases...
Firstly, for those devices that
would just automatically show a footnote as a popup note, I can see how that would "just happen", that is, a person clicks the little superscript footnote number (or however it's done) and then they get a little "popup note". The coding is just a regular ol' anchor to another part of the book, though -- what if that anchor points to, say, an entire chapter (like, you could have a link that says "Please see Chapter 3 for more info", with the coding exactly the same as for a footnote)? Surely if the device is "popup capable" then the entire chapter doesn't then show up in a popup note -- is there a limit to the amount of text, a "cut-off point", where the device either shows it as a popup, or otherwise actually goes to the anchored location?
Secondly, if I design my book in a way such that each chapter is a separate HTML file, could I put
all the footnotes for
all the various chapters into a separate HTML file (called, say, "footnotes.xhtml" or whatever)? For this aforementioned book I was thinking of doing (Thoreau's "Walden") there could potentially be 1000 footnotes or something, but in a way it would be easier to have all the footnotes separate like that, at the very end of the book -- as opposed to, say, having a TON of footnotes at the end of each chapter (and no doubt showing up in-between chapters, too, which would be a pain if a person just wanted to read straight through, without reading all the footnotes).
I hope those two questions aren't too silly
-- thanks so much for your feedback, Hitch (or anyone)!
