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spinster · 06-19-2018, 06:24 PM

Thanks, Hitch, for the lowdown, literally. That damned fly is in the ointment again! The question now, one probably impossible to answer, is what percentage of ereaders don’t have back functionality? If it’s small enough, perhaps one just has to forget about catering to the lowest common denominator, and let the devil take the hindmost. You can’t please everybody. Every few years Mac, and I’m sure everyone else, comes out with a new operating system, and, in time no longer supports the old ones, forcing you to upgrade. Apart from lack of a back function, I can’t imagine reading War and Peace on a smart phone or similar Lilliputian screen. It reminds me of Samuel Johnson who, when told of a woman preacher, said, “Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hinder legs; it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” But now here’s a return link back to the lack of back function problem: While you mention what a headache this is for you as a formatter, you don’t say how you deal with it, and I suppose that’s because there is no one’s-sighs-fit-all solution. One workaround I recently used in Word to check the links in the index was to open the go-to box and set it to the first page of the index, so that after clicking on a link, it was just a double-click to return to the index. When I got to the end of each page, I reset the page number. But any solution more involved than that, including using the search function, would likely be as much if not more of a pain to the reader than navigating back via the table of contents. Incidentally, I wonder if Amazon (and this has undoubtedly come up) deems lack of return links enough of a poor reader experience to suspend publication until it is rectified. I’ll have to run that by them.

Thanks also, Doitsu, for the related-link. A most informative thread.

06-19-2018, 06:24 PM	#11
spinster Junior Member Posts: 5 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jun 2018 Device: MacBook Pro	Thanks, Hitch, for the lowdown, literally. That damned fly is in the ointment again! The question now, one probably impossible to answer, is what percentage of ereaders don’t have back functionality? If it’s small enough, perhaps one just has to forget about catering to the lowest common denominator, and let the devil take the hindmost. You can’t please everybody. Every few years Mac, and I’m sure everyone else, comes out with a new operating system, and, in time no longer supports the old ones, forcing you to upgrade. Apart from lack of a back function, I can’t imagine reading War and Peace on a smart phone or similar Lilliputian screen. It reminds me of Samuel Johnson who, when told of a woman preacher, said, “Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hinder legs; it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” But now here’s a return link back to the lack of back function problem: While you mention what a headache this is for you as a formatter, you don’t say how you deal with it, and I suppose that’s because there is no one’s-sighs-fit-all solution. One workaround I recently used in Word to check the links in the index was to open the go-to box and set it to the first page of the index, so that after clicking on a link, it was just a double-click to return to the index. When I got to the end of each page, I reset the page number. But any solution more involved than that, including using the search function, would likely be as much if not more of a pain to the reader than navigating back via the table of contents. Incidentally, I wonder if Amazon (and this has undoubtedly come up) deems lack of return links enough of a poor reader experience to suspend publication until it is rectified. I’ll have to run that by them. Thanks also, Doitsu, for the related-link. A most informative thread.