Quote:
Originally Posted by maximus83
Ran across a possible bug in how Kobo handles popup footnotes.
Background: there are typically 2 ways of handling in-book footnotes. - Navigate to a separate location. This goes to a separate page at the point of the specific note, but displays all the other notes on the page too. User has to use 'back' navigation to return to position in text.
- Display a popup window in the current page. Contains only the content of the specific note, is in context, and does not require back navigation.
Most recent devices including Kindles and Kobos enable (2), and it works fine in most cases. But I've noticed a specific case where the Kobo software fails and falls back to (1). When there's a large set of end notes contained entirely on a separate HTML page, Kobo software tries to display everything from the content of the current note, to the end of the page (all the remaining notes as well). So whenever there's too much content for Kobo to display in a single footnote popup window (typically, when you're early in a chapter that has tons of footnotes :-) ), Kobo will fall back to approach (1). But as you get to the end of the chapter, say the last few footnotes and there isn't much content left on the "notes" page, Kobo will correctly go back to (2). I am not seeing this behavior on other devices on the same ebook content. For example, all the follow apps using the same epub file will handle footnotes just fine using approach (2): Calibre reader, FB Reader, KOReader.
Does this seem like a bug? If so, I have to think it should be straightforward to change that behavior, just display one note at a time versus "everything from that point to the end of the notes page." |
There is no real support for footnotes in epub2. Any reader that shows footnotes as a popup is using heuristics to guess whether the link is a footnote or a navigation link. The kepub renderer does this, as does the calibre viewer. Both will get it wrong sometimes. And it isn't hard to code the links and destination in such a way that they can't get it right.
epub 3 does have support for footnotes. The kepub renderer does handle these. It should get the popup correct if the code in the book is correct. But, again, it isn't hard to break. I don't think I have seen the footnote code outside test books. Because of this, the kepub renderer will apply the heuristics to the other links as well.
There has been discussion on this before. That included working out what some of the rules used for deciding if the link is a footnote.
For the last comment, when you do navigate to the full footnote from the popup, I don't think displaying the full page is a bad way to handle it. It does depend on how the footnote is coded. If it is in a separate file, it will be displayed by itself. But, that can cause other issues. There has been a lot of discussion on how to handle footnotes and endnotes in the Workshop forum. I don't remember that any of the alternatives were any better.