ePub page number and margins

[Toxaris]

Adobe made the leading ePUB rendering engine. All the rendering engines should follow the same specifications and more or less give the same results. More or less because some specifications are quite open for interpretation.
ADE does not produce books, but just interprets them. Kobo has written its own ePUB rendering engine, but I think they actually use an older version of ADE and adapted that.

[Julien Pham]

When I launch my book on ADE I have the same weird page number system though So I doubt newer ADE engine versions are better

[ghostyjack]

Newer ADE engines are better, I've got a T1 (with a newer ADE engine) and the page numbers are no longer displayed on the right-hand side, I only get page number on the bottom of the screen below the actual reading area.

Their method of page-numbering remains the same though. i.e. a page is represented by a 1000 characters of the file.

[Jim Lester]

Originally Posted by Julien Pham

When I launch my book on ADE I have the same weird page number system though So I doubt newer ADE engine versions are better

ADE 1.7 is several years old at this point and there have been several RMSDK (the underlying rendering engine) since it came out. If you want to see what a newer version of ADE will look like you can go to labs.adobe.com and download the preview version of ADE 1.8.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by ghostyjack

Their method of page-numbering remains the same though. i.e. a page is represented by a 1000 characters of the file.

There are a lot of advantages to that method instead of each screen. If you want to tell someone what page you are on you don't need to specify the size of the font and font family and the margin you used to determine the page number. Have a single number that is not font-family, font size and margin dependent is a good thing in my opinion although I do like the way Sony did pages with 2-1, 2-2, ..., 3-1 etc to provide both a ADE number and a screen sub-number. I do not know if this has been continued with the current product as I haven't seen one.

Dale

[Toxaris]

I agree. Perhaps they should not call it pages, since it is not actually a page, but at least it can function as a kind of pointer.

[Julien Pham]

I don't care telling someone what "page" I'm in Usually the ones I talk to about a book know the printed book, not the eBook one And so even if I tell them I'm on page 120, this will not be the page 120 of the printed book ^^

Usually I talk more about chapters than pages

But I think we should have the choice: a %, the number of page according to chapter, or end of book, or a fixed page system, this way we have the best of all worlds ^^

The fact is I don't like turning two pages to see the page number increased by one, and I like to know how many pages left till the end of the chapter, so I could know if it is doable or not to go to the end of chapter before going to sleep...

[ghostyjack]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

There are a lot of advantages to that method instead of each screen. If you want to tell someone what page you are on you don't need to specify the size of the font and font family and the margin you used to determine the page number. Have a single number that is not font-family, font size and margin dependent is a good thing in my opinion although I do like the way Sony did pages with 2-1, 2-2, ..., 3-1 etc to provide both a ADE number and a screen sub-number. I do not know if this has been continued with the current product as I haven't seen one.

Dale

I'm not disagreeing with you as I've got consistency across all my epub devices.

As to the Sony implementation; I'm currently on Page 7-8 of 316 according to my T1. You may not get screen sub-numbers but at least you can understand you are going to change pages.

No matter what solution anyone chooses so as to get perfect page numbering on their device, it will only be good for a single set of parameters and cannot be 100% successful on other devices or for other people.

ADE's solution is a compromise, but a compromise that can provide a consistant parameter/device/person agnostic method of displaying page numbers.

It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it works.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Adobe made the leading ePUB rendering engine. All the rendering engines should follow the same specifications and more or less give the same results. More or less because some specifications are quite open for interpretation.
ADE does not produce books, but just interprets them. Kobo has written its own ePUB rendering engine, but I think they actually use an older version of ADE and adapted that.

And Kobo's version of ADE has some serious bugs they refuse to fix such as the embedded font bug where putting the font-family to turn on an embedded font gets ignored.