Are these sections useful?

[Turtle91]

Again….

What you do for your own books is up to you.

When you come here and tell others that it isn’t important, when it actually IS, that’s when I have an issue with it.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Plus, I've no interest in homogenizing my reading experience. I enjoy a little formatting variety.

I'm mostly retaining the original look for the book and just fix the CSS to work better on a wide variety of readers.

For books where I have a physical copy, I will try and match the formatting to that, if it has unique character.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Again….

What you do for your own books is up to you.

When you come here and tell others that it isn’t important, when it actually IS, that’s when I have an issue with it.

How is it important when you are looking at the text on screen and you won't notice any difference?

[Turtle91]

Give it up Jon. If you are REALLY looking for an answer then go back and read the previous posts in this thread PLUS all the other threads where we've discussed these exact same issues (which you obviously didn't listen to there either).

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

How is it important when you are looking at the text on screen and you won't notice any difference?

For me, since I format ebooks for others as well as for myself, it is very important. It is not that much extra time and effort to continue those habits into all my ePub editing. Little things such as giving images meaningful alt text can make a great difference for someone who is using AT for a minimal effort on my part.

To me, your attitude is the same as those people who complain about making buildings wheel chair accessible, the "I don't need that so nobody should bother" attitude. You may not need those accommodations but there is that minority that does. Perhaps I might be biased since I did some volunteer work for UBC's Crane library when I was a student there decades back but such is life.

You might even consider how few seem to agree with your opinion compared to the number who disagree?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

For me, since I format ebooks for others as well as for myself, it is very important. It is not that much extra time and effort to continue those habits into all my ePub editing. Little things such as giving images meaningful alt text can make a great difference for someone who is using AT for a minimal effort on my part.

To me, your attitude is the same as those people who complain about making buildings wheel chair accessible, the "I don't need that so nobody should bother" attitude. You may not need those accommodations but there is that minority that does. Perhaps I might be biased since I did some volunteer work for UBC's Crane library when I was a student there decades back but such is life.

You might even consider how few seem to agree with your opinion compared to the number who disagree?

If I was editing an eBook for someone who needed AT, I would make sure it followed the rules. As for <em> and <i>, if it was done correctly by the publisher, I would leave it be. I don't fix that sort of thing as I don't use AT.

Where we live is wheelchair accessible. We made sure when the bought it that it could be adapted to be. We had a deck put in and got it with a ramp.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by foosion

In the context of editing commercial books for personal use, there are some sections in epubs (especially in the front before the actual text) that don't seem very useful and often seem more a legacy of paper books.

[...]

Index: Often lists print page numbers and suggests using search. In any event, search seems better.

Oh boy... Indexes. I'll just link to all the previous in-depth discussion on it:

• 2020: "How to export indexes from indesign to epub" (Post #40) + (Post #42)
  
  • Have you ever even learned "How to Read a Book"?
    
• 2022: "Page Numbers on Sigil"

Best to just leave Indexes in there. It's not hurting anybody.

And a concordance (Search) ≠ human-curated Index.

You can read more detailed reasons/examples in those threads above. Me and Hitch (and other MR users) have had many discussions about it in the past 12+ years.

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Just because you haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it’s not out there and used properly. You obviously haven't seen my books (or read the examples I've posted here) then you would have seen them...

lol. Pretty funny. I take a year off, and come back to see the same exact things being posted by a certain curmudgeon user!

Whenever <em> and <i> gets brought up, there is only need to point to the 2 best dang topics about it:

• 2021: "Italics and Bold"
  
  • Goes over the basics of <i>/<em> + <b>/<strong> + gives examples of where/why you'd use each.
    
  • Text-to-Speech, Auto-Translation, and different languages are the key reasons too.
    
• 2020: "<i>, <em> or <span> for italics ?"
  
  • Earlier discussion covering even more cases.
    

And then there was the more recent best dang:

• 2023: "Semantic markup question!"

which covered stuff like:

• "Do I Put Spaces Inside Italics/Emphasis?"
• "Does Punctuation Go Inside the <i> or <em>?"
• "What's This Text? <i> or <em>?"
• "Should I Mark Italics Or Emphasis If I Can?"
• "Are <i> and <em> the Same?"

and describes some really awesome/advanced tricks you can do to speed things up, like:

• Using CSS to temporarily highlight <i>/<em> in different colors.
• Using Sigil's new "Filter Replacements"/"Dry-Run Replace" to mass correct italics <-> Emphasis.
  
  • Back in early 2023, that was just theoretical! Now in 2024, it's possible.
    
    • Can be found in Sigil by Shift+Left-Clicking on the "Replace All" or "Count All" buttons.

There is no reason to beat that dead horse yet again.

The tools are there, the functionality is there, and it's so much faster to mark up properly than it used to be.

[foosion]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Oh boy... Indexes. I'll just link to all the previous in-depth discussion on it:

• 2020: "How to export indexes from indesign to epub" (Post #40) + (Post #42)
  
  • Have you ever even learned "How to Read a Book"?
    
• 2022: "Page Numbers on Sigil"

Best to just leave Indexes in there. It's not hurting anybody.

And a concordance (Search) ≠ human-curated Index.

You can read more detailed reasons/examples in those threads above. Me and Hitch (and other MR users) have had many discussions about it in the past 12+ years.

I'm not convinced an index is useful in an ebook. I'm not seeing anything that makes it more useful than word search. Seeing how many entries there are? You can search. Not sure of a word that has variants? Search for a stem.

And not a fan of Mortimer Adler.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by foosion

I'm not convinced an index is useful in an ebook. I'm not seeing anything that makes it more useful than word search. Seeing how many entries there are? You can search. Not sure of a word that has variants? Search for a stem.

More detailed explanations are given in those threads...

But here's just a few.

- - -

Take this Index:

famous philosophers
   Aristotle, 1, 5 
   Aquinas, Thomas, 10
   Socrates, 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 175, 200, 225, 250
Teapot, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10

1. Indexes can capture broader terms that may not ever show up directly in the book.

A simple search for:

• famous
• philosophy

may get you 0 hits... or the exact opposite—thousands of irrelevant hits you have to sift through:

• "Socrates" is mentioned 100 times throughout the book (in passing, maybe in a quote), but only 10 of those are important.
• "philosophy" only has 2 hits, but "philosopher" has 100.

2. If you're reading this book for the first time, you may never even have the idea to search for "Aquinas".

Or maybe you know the guy as "Thomas Aquinas", but only his last name shows up in the actual text.

3. Based on size of entries, you can quickly gather importance of certain terms/topics.

For example:

• "Socrates must be a super important guy! He has 10 entries!"
• "Aquinas only has 1."
• "Teapot has 5!!!"
  
  • "This guy must love his tea!"

The author thinks Socrates is extra important, because his entry is huge, so "I better pay extra attention any time he gets mentioned!"

- - -

Skimming the Index is a key skill + very helpful for research too. (The information density is huge!)

And once you "prep your mind" for what's coming up, you can more effectively absorb this information too.

- - -

Side Note on Points 1/2 (Search for Exact Terms): This can also happen for abbreviations/titles...

The book I'm currently working on uses a ton of "Amb." (It took a while until my brain even adjusted to understand that as short for "Ambassador".)

Here's just a few of the hits:

• Amb. Chas Freeman
  
  • first + last name
• Amb. Matlock
  
  • last name only
• Former Amb. Zimmermann
  
  • prefix + last name
• Canadian Amb. Bissett
  
  • country + last name

and then you have:

• 74 Ambassador
  
  • The person's official title.
• 63 ambassador
  
  • Generic/Mentioned in passing.
• 36 Amb.
  
  • Shortened abbreviation.
• 1 Ambassador-at-Large

and then you have a bunch of:

• 22 Freeman

which could be:

1. "Chas Freeman", the ambassador.
2. Multiple other people/authors with the same last name!
3. Organizations with "Freeman" in the name!

An Index would have all this stuff minimized to "the important ambassadors" (a super-condensed list).

While raw search would have you sifting through at least 2 sets of terms + 200 hits... just for "ambassador"s!

- - -

Like I said above, it doesn't hurt to leave an Index in. It can only help.

[foosion]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

More detailed explanations are given in those threads...
But here's just a few.

Those seem to be approximately what I mentioned. Relative importance seems the most salient.

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

2. If you're reading this book for the first time, you may never even have the idea to search for "Aquinas".

Perhaps you could read the book to find out about Aquinas.

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Like I said above, it doesn't hurt to leave an Index in. It can only help.

I'd rather just read the text. If I feel I've missed something significant I can always go back.

If there are more than a few index entries with lots of entries I'm unlikely to memorize the list in order to learn what I might focus on, as it would likely just seem a collection of random words. As opposed to reading the text in which presumably things will be fleshed out.

[Sirtel]

For myself, I always delete half-title, praise, other books by author or publisher, next reads and other ads. I usually leave the inline TOC, just in case (unless it doesn't work - I've seen it just copied from a paper edition with nonexistent page numbers and no working links), full title page (I like to look at it when I open a book for the first time), copyright page, indexes, introduction and dedication.

As to homogenizing my reading experience in regard to fonts, margins, line-height et al, yes, absolutely. I need it to be the same in all my ebooks. Anything else distracts and annoys me.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

For myself, I always delete half-title, praise, other books by author or publisher, next reads and other ads. I usually leave the inline TOC, just in case (unless it doesn't work - I've seen it just copied from a paper edition with nonexistent page numbers and no working links), full title page (I like to look at it when I open a book for the first time), copyright page, indexes, introduction and dedication.

As to homogenizing my reading experience in regard to fonts, margins, line-height et al, yes, absolutely. I need it to be the same in all my ebooks. Anything else distracts and annoys me.

The problem with leaving the HTML ToC is that when you delete bits, the ToC does not get updated. So it then becomes incorrect. So I deleted it as it's easier to do that then to keep it. Besides, I never use it.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem with leaving the HTML ToC is that when you delete bits, the ToC does not get updated. So it then becomes incorrect. So I deleted it as it's easier to do that then to keep it. Besides, I never use it.

I'm not bothered by a few nonworking links in the html TOC, as long as the links to main text are working.

And I've used it sometimes - with very long omnibus editions, because Kobo doesn't do nested TOC and sometimes it's just easier to use the html TOC in those cases than to endlessly scroll the ncx TOC.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I'm not bothered by a few nonworking links in the html TOC, as long as the links to main text are working.

One thing I do dislike is error messages which I will get because of the invalid links.

[KevinH]

We really need 2 epub forums ... One for professional epub developers who care about accessibility, correctness, etc. And another forum for all those users who want to hack away at professionally developed epubs to meet their one unique desires/fixations/needs.

That way we won't have to rehash all of the accessibility and standards arguments again and again.