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Karellen · 03-01-2022, 04:53 PM

Thanks for the suggestions everybody.

The last couple of days I have been fiddling with the suggestions and came up with the following

Quote:

Originally Posted by Turtle91

You could manually create an index. Otherwise it would be a function of the reading app or device. The app I use can do this, it’s called Marvin, but is only available on iOS.

I didn't try to create an index, but from what little I read, it wasn't too far different (but probably a bit more work) than my current method of creating a Character Summary at the end of the book. I am on Windows, so couldn't play with Marvin

Quote:

Originally Posted by j.p.s

You could make your "Character Summary" a glossary at the front of the book. Then when you do an in book search on a word, the glossary entry is the first hit. Your reading software needs to have "back" functionality. As a 12 year kindle user who did not do in book searching in my pre-kindle days, I was shocked that many platforms do not have true "back" functionality.

And just FYI, the kindle X-ray functionality has what you are looking for and more (when they bother to do more than a half-ass job populating the X-ray database for the book).

From what I could see, no major difference to creating a Character Summary at the end of the book and just skipping to the last chapter, no search typing required.

Quote:

Originally Posted by j.p.s

For platforms that don't properly support "back" functionality but do allow use of open format dictionaries, you could build your "Character Summary" as a dictionary.

While I liked this idea, it is not workable. You can't make a particular dictionary exclusive to a specific novel. Then as the number of novels increase on the ereader, overlapping of character names from different novels increases.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JSWolf

There is something you can do with your Kobo that would work for what you want. I know it works for ePub. But I cannot say about KePub.

Highlight the character name and also put in your note(s) about that character. Then whenever you want to look up your notes on the character, go to the list of the highlights and when you see the highlight for said character, you'll also see your note(s).

I also liked this.
In some cases it was easy because the characters name and a description of the role s/he played were in the same sentence/praragraph. Highlight the entire section and done
In most other cases the character description was revealed much later in the novel, so the typing on the small keyboard with my fat stubby fingers became a bit of a nuisance.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Kindle users could use the WordDumb Calibre plugin to generate XRay files.
It shouldn't be too complicated to modify the plugin to generate endnotes with character definitions and link the definition to the first occurrence of a character.
It also wouldn't be too difficult to generate a StarDict dictionary with the same information for EPUB apps.

I haven't tried this, but will look into it a bit further, but my python skills are almost non-existent.

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I also tried a <a> link to the Character Summary.
A search for "Michael" and replace with <a href....>Michael</a> then follow with a regex-function to append an incremental number to each id. (yes, I know, many of you could have done that in the one operation

)
This worked well in combination with using the "back" function to return to the original position. The only downside I saw was the sheer number of links. After editing six character names I was already over 2,000 links, with 19 characters to go.
Do the enormous number of links cause any problems to the ereader or epub file? Are these stored in the ereader database?

At this stage, I will stick with the simple character summary at the back. An example for The Runaway Jury by John Grisham below

Spoiler: