Sick and tired of acting as proofreader for lazy publishers

[Joques]

I have had to correct a good many errors in my five years as a digital reader. But I'm reading Cryptonomicon right now, and there is a recurring error that has me baffled. I found that lots of places in the text, words are split into two, with a space between, like "eas ily" or "de forested". I assumed it was some kind of OCR-removal-of-hyphens procedure gone wrong, but just now I took a peek into the book with Calibre's editor, and it seems there are myriads of these strings inserted willy-nilly into the text - most of them invisible, but when one appears _inside_ of a word, you can see it. The string is:

<a id="page_x"></a>

where "x" is an integer. Does anybody have the faintest clue what purpose these strings serve, and why they should be scattered all over my book?

There's another, more easily explained error too: half the illustrations in the book are rotated 90 degrees. I have to assume this is laziness, stupidity or both.

I am getting _really_ sick and tired of publishers not doing their job - and for me to even do their job and correct their mistakes, I have to commit what is technically a crime.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Joques

The string is:

<a id="page_x"></a>

where "x" is an integer. Does anybody have the faintest clue what purpose these strings serve, and why they should be scattered all over my book?

Hmmmm. The word "page."
Followed by a number.
In a book.

I've got nothing.

[Joques]

Very droll. I guessed they had something to do with pagination, but have never seen these strings inserted into words and creating inappropriate spaces before. I assumed they were left-over fragments of obsolete code, but looking more closely at them now, I see they are indeed in correct order and one for each "page". So they are epub's way of keeping track of pages? Still supremely annoying to have them chop up words like this :-)

[DiapDealer]

They definitely should NOT be inserted into the middle of words. Unless, of course, they were striving to match the page numbering of a particular physical book edition exactly--and that's actually where the page-breaks occurred in that edition (in which case there still probably should have been a hyphen).

As for rotated images, I would imagine that might depend on the orientation of the image. Why reduce the size of a landscape image enough to fit into a portrait situation? Or vice-versa? Especially when many readers/apps implement a way to zoom/pan/rotate images easily.

As for my drollness ... c'mon ... you have to admit that was some pretty low-hanging fruit you dangled there.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

As for my drollness ... c'mon ... you have to admit that was some pretty low-hanging fruit you dangled there.

...hmmm ...not going there

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

...hmmm ...not going there

Your restraint is appreciated

[doubleshuffle]

I've seen lots of books that had these page references in the code, often in the middle of a word. No problem at all in ADE, which introduces no extra space there. So the problem is not with the code but with the reading software.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

I've seen lots of books that had these page references in the code, often in the middle of a word. No problem at all in ADE, which introduces no extra space there. So the problem is not with the code but with the reading software.

I agree; it is a bug in the reading software for an anchor tag to cause a word to break. Nothing wrong with the book.

What reading software are you using, Joques?

[Joques]

DiapDealer, the images are small and fit either way. One is just a small mathematical function, which is the only such function that is rotated. All the others are right side up. And I'll thank you to leave my fruits alone!

HarryT, I use a Kobo Aura HD, with kepubified epubs, but the same error is also present when I open the book in the Calibre reader. Here is an example:

Randy has spent al <a id="page_540"/> most no time around military people.

In both my Kobo (kepub) and in Calibre (epub) this is shown as:

Randy has spent al most no time around military people.

Super annoying.

EITHER way, I feel my original point still stands The most recent super annoying book was Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, where very often the space between a period ending a sentence, and the capital first letter of the next sentence, would be absent.Super duper annoying. <-- see what I did there?

[Joques]

As an aside, in all the cases where this string is placed between words, there is no extra space, there is just the normal one. Don't know how relevant that is.

[gbm]

If this is a direct copy paste:

Randy has spent al <a id="page_540"/> most no time around military people.

then it should have been:

Randy has spent al<a id="page_540"/>most no time around military people.

Their should have been no spaces before "<" or after ">".

bernie

[Joques]

It was direct copy/paste. There are spaces on either side of the strings, every time.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Joques

As an aside, in all the cases where this string is placed between words, there is no extra space, there is just the normal one. Don't know how relevant that is.

If there is a space, that will certainly break the word:

al<a id="page x"></a>most

would be fine, but:

al <a id="page x"></a>most

is not.

[gbm]

Did you download the epub using Adobe or did you covert a kepub to epub using cabilre?

bernie

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Joques

It was direct copy/paste. There are spaces on either side of the strings, every time.

Then that is an error in the book.