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Liudprand · 08-13-2023, 08:12 PM

Thanks for the reply - most of which I understand!

What I'm finding frustrating is that it's difficult to find any step-by-step guide, either online or off (I'm talking about several books on ebook formatting that I've paid cold, hard cash for) for this kind of thing. I've looked at several books, and NONE of them has anything to say about this question. I'm very unfamiliar with HTML and CSS, so Word (or InDesign) are the only tools I can use to edit a epub file at all.

An example of my enduring confusion on this: Do you mean that the link to the paragraph with the note text has to be two-way, as it will eventually be in the ebook? That's not possible in Word, afaik. But does Calibre fix that in the conversion process?

And you say Word footnotes are "buggy". That may well be true in various senses - but I've been using them as a professional book editor for about 18 years now, and never had a problem. If you format everything correctly in Word, most things transfer cleanly to, for example, InDesign. Also, the Word add-on I mentioned above - WordToEpub - makes a perfectly good job of numbering notes within chapters when you make the conversion. So I'm confused about why other pieces of software, including Calibre, can't just implement the same behaviour. I don't mean it's not a significant amount of work, or that the developer of Calibre should get on it right away - I just mean in principle I don't see why it's not perfectly feasible - since both InDesign and WordToEpub have implemented it.

Anyway, thanks again for the response. And, by the way, I don't expect you to respond to my follow-ups unless you want to. I would, though, appreciate it if you or anyone else could point me to the most comprehensive, professional source available from which I could teach myself all of this stuff.

08-13-2023, 08:12 PM	#5
Liudprand Zealot Posts: 133 Karma: 10 Join Date: Nov 2021 Device: Kobo Libra 2	Thanks for the reply - most of which I understand! What I'm finding frustrating is that it's difficult to find any step-by-step guide, either online or off (I'm talking about several books on ebook formatting that I've paid cold, hard cash for) for this kind of thing. I've looked at several books, and NONE of them has anything to say about this question. I'm very unfamiliar with HTML and CSS, so Word (or InDesign) are the only tools I can use to edit a epub file at all. An example of my enduring confusion on this: Do you mean that the link to the paragraph with the note text has to be two-way, as it will eventually be in the ebook? That's not possible in Word, afaik. But does Calibre fix that in the conversion process? And you say Word footnotes are "buggy". That may well be true in various senses - but I've been using them as a professional book editor for about 18 years now, and never had a problem. If you format everything correctly in Word, most things transfer cleanly to, for example, InDesign. Also, the Word add-on I mentioned above - WordToEpub - makes a perfectly good job of numbering notes within chapters when you make the conversion. So I'm confused about why other pieces of software, including Calibre, can't just implement the same behaviour. I don't mean it's not a significant amount of work, or that the developer of Calibre should get on it right away - I just mean in principle I don't see why it's not perfectly feasible - since both InDesign and WordToEpub have implemented it. Anyway, thanks again for the response. And, by the way, I don't expect you to respond to my follow-ups unless you want to. I would, though, appreciate it if you or anyone else could point me to the most comprehensive, professional source available from which I could teach myself all of this stuff.