Footnotes and Connect

[Andanzas]

Has anyone bought books from Connect that have footnotes that actually work? Which ones?

I bought Friedman's Law in America and the numbers were not linked to the footnotes, so they were pretty much useless.

[flumbo]

World War Z has footnotes that work and they work very well. It was the only use I had for the joystick in a book until the page hacks came out.

I thought the footnotes were very convenient and the reader interface worked great. It was much easier than reading footnotes in a paper book.

[monkeywrench]

Hey Andanzas,

We started discussing formatting issues in this other thread towards the end of last week. Europas_ice posted this which may help you out.

Originally Posted by europas_ice

Sony's survey at the following link has the following question:

http://connect-metrics.custhelp.com/...eys/ws?_133=22

"7) Sometimes a publisher may submit eBooks that are incomplete or contain typos. If you experience this with any of the eBooks you purchase, please provide us with as many details as possible (page number (e.g. page 101 of 1001), the misspelled word(s), etc.) so we can forward and have them corrected. Please provide us with your email address as well so we can notify you when you will be able to download the corrected version."

Which makes it sound like typos are fixable and that they will fix them if you tell them about them.

The issue that I encountered was with Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer where clicking on a foot note would take me to the foot notes but clicking on "return to text" would take me back to some completely different page. I experienced this issue regardless of the text size that was in use at the time. I was able to use the joystick by pushing it left to go back in history rather than clicking it down which should have worked. I am going to see if filling out the survey works to get the errors corrected. If you try this let us know if you receive any response.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by monkeywrench

Hey Andanzas,


The issue that I encountered was with Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer where clicking on a foot note would take me to the foot notes but clicking on "return to text" would take me back to some completely different page. I experienced this issue regardless of the text size that was in use at the time. I was able to use the joystick by pushing it left to go back in history rather than clicking it down which should have worked. I am going to see if filling out the survey works to get the errors corrected. If you try this let us know if you receive any response.

That is a limitation of the LRF format. It doesn't support inline links. i.e. liniks to text within a paragraph. It only support block level links.

[monkeywrench]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

That is a limitation of the LRF format. It doesn't support inline links. i.e. liniks to text within a paragraph. It only support block level links.

Hey Kovidgoyal,

What would be considered a block? Often times in the book that I mentioned I will land 5 or 6 pages from where the link was at.

[HarryT]

That sounds wrong. I've created lots of books with footnotes, and in each case the link takes you to the start of the correct paragraph. Sounds like a problem with the books in question to me.

[kovidgoyal]

The LRS Spec defines an element called a TextBlock. A TextBlock can contain multiple paragraphs. However every textblock begins on a new line. LRS link element can only point to TextBlocks. For inline anchors, something like this

this is a part of a larger paragraph with a <a name="destination">anchor</a> embedded in it.

you'd have to start a new TextBlock at anchor, but that would mean a paragraph break. Thus you can only point to the enclosing TextBlock. Sometimes the enclosing TextBlock can have a lot of content before it, thereby making the link point to a different page. Depending on how intelligent the automated conversion software is, the link to an inline element like a footnote can sometimes be way off.

So yes, it is a problem with the book, in that by manual intervention, it's usually possible to create correct links, the problem is really caused by the limitations of the underlying LRS format.

[Andanzas]

monkeywrench, thank you for the link. I wrote to them to let them know about the problem with this book, Law in America; I also told them that I was interested in buying three other books but first I needed to know if the footnotes were properly formatted. I have received no answer yet.

[monkeywrench]

No problem. I am interested to hear what they have to say. I guess I am really interested to see if they will try the other three books to see if the footnotes are actually setup properly.