Fractional Page Numbering

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

I think I need to clarify a bit.

The only differences between this book and normal (real book)

But you aren't clarifying. In fact, you are making this much more muddy. The eBook is a REAL BOOK! So please drop the pBook is real and the eBook is not.

[j.p.s]

When discussing the various numbering schemes in this thread, please assume everyone knows the order of magnitude each scheme for the same book. Please take all discussion of counting definitions for each scheme to one of the numerous existing threads on book progress display, or start a new one. The how many words can dance on a page arguing is not welcome in this thread.

Even if everyone else has gotten bored of the central topic of this thread and has nothing constructive to contribute on it, I do.

Thanks.

[leebase]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

pBooks are not the issue. They have nothing to do with eBook page numbers. Drop pBooks from this.

I disagree. It's the lifetime of the numbers in paper books that my mind understands when I hear a book has "600 pages".

My ebook can have 600 pages or 1800 pages depending on what I set the font size too....and change again if I switch from my iPhone to my iPad.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

pBooks are not the issue. They have nothing to do with eBook page numbers. Drop pBooks from this.

Originally Posted by leebase

I disagree. It's the lifetime of the numbers in paper books that my mind understands when I hear a book has "600 pages".

My ebook can have 600 pages or 1800 pages depending on what I set the font size too....and change again if I switch from my iPhone to my iPad.

I missed post #60 in all the noise.

It is very common for ebooks to be published with anchors and references based on page numbers in a print edition and is at the very core of this thread's subject matter.

JSWolf, you are completely wrong in all three of your sentences and you also have no standing whatsoever to order anything out of this thread. In my opinion, you yourself have been one of the worst offenders for veering way off topic in this thread.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Again so very very very wrong. The idea is not to have the same page numbers between eBooks and pBooks. The idea is to have consistent page numbers for eBooks and ADE page numbers is that consistent page number system.

Jon, please read the first post of the thread.

There are already quite a few numbering schemes for showing location in an ebook, but I would like to discuss one more, (decimal) fractional page numbers. This would allow "real page numbers" that match a specific print version for reference purposes (but does have the problem that many books have multiple print editions with varying pagination), and still show change for each ebook page turn.

Emphasis mine, "real" in this case referring to physical books.

The point of ADE isn't to match, but the only one championing ADE is you. We've beaten the ADE discussion to death, and shown even the developers of it stated they made it up off an arbitrary number with no connection to any physical book. Thus ADE has no place in this thread since it will never connect to a physical book.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Still not going to work. The eBook software will not know where that page one is.

Yes because it's impossible to mark a starting location for software I find this excuse especially hilarious since you want all software to be changed to use ADE, which again has no place in this thread due to its limitations of never applying to a physical edition.

Fractional page numbering, as describe in the OP, ties a physical page of a book to a "page" of an ebook, with the exception apparently of KFX8.

Word count, would also could be utilized in the same way, find one edition get the words per page, and mark them in the ebook as the start/stop of a "page".

[issybird]

Moderator Notice
The OP has requested that people stay on topic and not comment if they don't have anything to add to the discussion. So do it. Especially those who have carried their private war to this thread. Future off topic comments will be deleted.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Kfxgen restricts page labels to be either integers or roman numerals. Anything else in the source EPUB will be rejected. Even a single incorrect entry will cause the entire pagemap/pagelist to be rejected resulting in no page numbers being shown at all.

Hmmm. Now this is something I've never even thought of before:

How would digitization of newspapers/magazines/journals occur?

Think old school "Continued on A5", or even more egregious, where articles were split in halfs/thirds and located in completely incongruent page numbers:

Article 1:

- A1
- A6
- A9

Article 2:

- A1
- A6-A8

Also, is it even valid to have two of the same exact <a id="page"> in a pagemap/pagelist? (I doubt it.)

The only time I ever worked on something like this was a journal that ran over multiple decades... but that still had pages numbered 1-### (but did have articles split across incongruent pages).

Originally Posted by MGlitch

Fractional page numbering, as describe in the OP, ties a physical page of a book to a "page" of an ebook, with the exception apparently of KFX8.

Hmmm... although I'm still not seeing the compelling argument for these in-between fractions.

It's just adding yet another arbitrary point + it's still going to have all the same issues as non-fractional pages (if font size gets big enough and/or device small enough, even these "fractional pages" won't change).

I can see the argument for non-integer and non-roman-numeral pages... but to add decimals "just because"? It's not selling me...

Originally Posted by leebase

I disagree. It's the lifetime of the numbers in paper books that my mind understands when I hear a book has "600 pages".

My ebook can have 600 pages or 1800 pages depending on what I set the font size too....and change again if I switch from my iPhone to my iPad.

Density per page in Physical Books varies WILDLY. They're completely depend on font/page size, margins, etc. (Usual book can go anywhere from 150-600+ words per page. If you push columns, density can even go 800+.)

I agree with JSWolf on one thing, that's a huge advantage for Byte-Methods (especially ADE-type algorithms that compress) + raw Word Counts.

Side Note on Terminology: I would recommend being more specific with your wording:

Pages = physical book pages
Screens = "pages" on a specific device's monitor

I discussed this in-depth in the "Real Page Numbers" thread linked above. People interchangeably use "pages" to mean 3+ different things at the same time. (It's why I think Amazon's "Locations" is a better term, and ADE's "Pages" was a poor choice.)

Side Note On Physical Density:

Here's a 1000 page book I've been retypesetting. This very minor tweak in density can change it to 940 pages:



Even when working with the same exact text... a typesetter can aim towards X amount of pages, then tweak all the variables to force that goal in mind:

• Bigger gap between page number + bottom of text
• larger gap between header + top of text
• expand margins
• More hyphenation
• Microtypography (Stretching/Shrinking characters)
• [...]

Minor Margins Side Note: Back in 2014 I showed how a teeny change in footnote margins from 1.2em to 1.1em could cause two words—"is of"—to be pulled to the previous line and cause a cascading effect throughout a chapter:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...94#post2976294

Originally Posted by leebase

FYI - the "switching to word counts" was my solution to MY use case: how big is this book?

For many cases, I would say "word count" accuracy >> pages...

It's why most of the (English) publishing/editing industry settled on standard manuscript pages = "250/300 words per page".

But again, know that each method has its own serious flaws.

"Word Count" might be a-okay for (English) Fiction, but Non-Fiction, so many more edge cases creep in...

URLs

Becoming more and more and more relevant since the internet:

http://www.example.com/123.web/article12345.html

1 word? 8 words?

<a href="http://www.example.com/123.web/article12345.html">Article Title</a>

2 words? 10 words?

In Print books, URLs need to be completely typed out, but in ebooks, these can be hidden in a clickable URL.

(I tested URLs in Word, as long as there's not a space, it considers the entire "http://[...].html" 1 word.)

One of the latest Non-Fiction books I worked on had 1000+ footnotes with 1.5k+ URLs. Depending on how you answer this can vastly change the "Word Count" of the book:

Here's that book's "Word Count":

123,275 (Sigil)
125,959 (Word 2016)

If you were counting Physical Pages? Well, let's just say URLs take up a huge amount of space. (In that book, after removing URLs >50 pages in Word disappeared.)

Slashes (Related to URLs)

The backwards/forward slash.

3 words? 4?

(Word considers it 3.)

I would strongly lean towards it being 4 different words.

Images (Alt Text)

<img alt="Photograph of George Washington" src="../George.jpg" />

0 words? 4 words?

Alt Text is read/displayed with Text-to-Speech. There can be a ton of hidden information here, but again, which format you're in leads to different "word counts".

• Physical book it looks just like an image.
• Ebook it looks like an image, but the text is hidden.
• In Audiobook (or Text-to-Speech), these are actual words
  • (although in the audiobook they may SKIP over image+captions!).

Emojis

(I was actually thinking of this one a few days ago. I know Hitch has brought this up a few times over the years: these characters are becoming EVEN MORE and more prevalent in actual novels...)

🧛*♂️

Is this 1 or 2 words?

• Vampire?
• Dracula?
• Man Vampire?
  • In its encoding, it's a VAMPIRE (U+1F9DB) + MALE SIGN (U+2642). Depending on your program, it might display as 1 or 2 separate characters.

Or maybe it's even 0 words?

👫

Is this 1 or 5 words?

• Man and Woman Holding Hands?

(This isn't even bringing all the skin color additions...)

(I tested in Word, it only counts an emoji with spaces around it as a word, so ⚽⚾🏈🏀 = "1 word".)

Superscripts

This is an example.<sup>1</sup>
The molecule for water is H<sub>2</sub>O.
Answer is x<sup>power</sup><sub>subscript</sub>

Is what's in the super/subscripts a separate word?

Bibliographies/Indexes

Might add a lot of "words", but be extremely dense. (Very few physical pages to get A TON of information across.)

Complete Side Note: A lot of this reminds me of discussion surrounding "How many words are there in the English language?"

See Merriam Webster's article "How many words are there in English?":

There is no exact count of the number of words in English, and one reason is certainly because languages are ever expanding; [...] Consider such words as "cannoli" and "teriyaki," which come from other tongues but are established through use, context, and frequency as English. There are many other thorny considerations that complicate the task of counting individual words and tallying up the language in that way. For example, are all of the inflected forms of a word–for instance, "drive," "drives," "drove," etc.–one word or several separate words?

Similarly, there are twelve different words with the spelling "post" entered in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged; they all have different parts of speech or derivations. Should these twelve be considered one word for the purposes of our reckoning? Some scholars would insist the distinct forms of "post" only be counted once, but others consider each one a separate word that should be counted individually.

Another puzzle: should "port of call," another Webster's Third entry, count as a word, even though each of its components is entered separately?

[...]

You would think it's easy (just count how many words in the dictionary!), but it's an impossibly hard problem, and depends completely on methodology. Different assumptions will lead to huge fluctuations in outcome.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Again so very very very wrong. The idea is not to have the same page numbers between eBooks and pBooks. The idea is to have consistent page numbers for eBooks and ADE page numbers is that consistent page number system.

We've discussed this extensively back in 2017:

Citing Websites

(It seems like this "Page Numbers" talk bubbles up about once every year or two and explodes into an enormous volcano! :P)

I just want to say... those Byte-based algorithms can easily be thrown off by substituting HTML Entities or Pretty Print:

The amount of bytes for:

• — =/= &mdash; =/= &#8212;
• “ ” =/= &ldquo; &rdquo; =/= &#8220; &#8221;

I just grabbed Alice in Wonderland off Project Gutenberg:

ADE Pages:

66 (Original EPUB)
67 (Pretty Print)
68 (Pretty Print + HTML Entities)

You can imagine how a larger book would fare. It could be dozens of "ADE Pages" off.

(I attached the EPUBs below.)

Pre-empting JSWolf's Answer: Yes, I know... according to you, "everything should be Pretty Printed and using actual UTF-8 characters".

But seriously... you have got to stop this ADE+JSWolf's way is the one, true way!

Originally Posted by j.p.s

It is very common for ebooks to be published with anchors and references based on page numbers in a print edition and is at the very core of this thread's subject matter.

And I think it's important to stress again, that there's multiple different overlaps happening at once.

You have the things that are:

• born-print and needs to be digitized
• purely born-digital
  
  • Websites + new documents
• and anything in-between

None of those counting solutions will work perfectly for all cases... but one thing's for certain, page numbers have been around for hundreds of years, and they're probably not going anywhere (no matter how much me and JSWolf want everything to be purely digital). :P

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by rcentros

A kilometer is no more "accurate" than a mile. Nor is Celsius more accurate than Fahrenheit. For practical purposes Celsius is perceived as less accurate, since the range between 32 and 212 is wider than the range between 0 and 100.

That is an example of the utility of fractions. Less temperature change between integer degrees does not not make Fahrenheit more accurate than Celsius, it allows more precision when restricted to integers. With fractions, neither Fahrenheit nor Celsius is more accurate or more precise.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Back to the original topic of this thread, one place where fractional page numbers will not work is in Amazon's KFX (Enhanced Typesetting) format.

Kfxgen restricts page labels to be either integers or roman numerals. Anything else in the source EPUB will be rejected. Even a single incorrect entry will cause the entire pagemap/pagelist to be rejected resulting in no page numbers being shown at all.

Via my propensity for typos, I have noticed that kindlegen will also reject the entire pagemap/pagelist if it notices an error. Because I had to repeat my entire process a few times prior to making the first post and there are still some manual steps when I start at the asciidoc conversion to EPUB, I can not guarantee that there are no errors in the pagelist in the EPUB or that there are no duplicate, missing, or out of order page number targets in the asciidoc. Those had happened in prior iterations and I think I did eventually weed them all out, but late in the process, I switched to a completely different and better method designating pages in asciidoc, was getting short of time, and was eager to make the initial post so that I didn't want to lose all the mental context I had built up.

Anyway, I am curious whether kfxgen will accept something like "3a" as the visible text label for a page despite the apparent rule violation.

[j.p.s]

Tex2002ans,

I am not ignoring you. I am a very slow reader, even slower typist, and most points that you make in just about any post you have made in any thread anywhere require quite a bit of deliberation to formulate a response that is worthy.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by leebase

I'm a reader of thick books...and there was always a since of pride watching the book mark make it's way through the book. I MISS that feeling reading ebooks. One of the few things I miss.

Since you don't read on eink devices, you might not be aware of the progress bar at the bottom of the page on pre-touchscreen kindles. I really really miss that. (I certainly would have not minded if it could have been toggled off for those that did not want it.)

It not only showed progress in the book, there were tick marks for each chapter. You could not only tell where you were in the book but also where you were in the current chapter. It was also usually easy to tell whether there were appendices, indices, etc at the end. I also really miss being able to flick back and forth between chapters with the joystick or d-ring. I've gotten used to much of touch screen functionality, but for some things I still strongly prefer buttons.

[leebase]

All my book apps let me know how far along I am in reading. What they don’t do is tell me “how big of a book is this”. I’m not even sure anything will ever match that sense of “big heavy book”.

Actually, while I am lamenting this on the one hand...,not having to carry around or read a big heavy book is on of the things I like about ebooks

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Anyway, I am curious whether kfxgen will accept something like "3a" as the visible text label for a page despite the apparent rule violation.

No. Here is the error it produces:

Internal Warning 10016: "Page Number encountered with invalid label while processing logical page number. Source : 3a"
Internal Warning 10021: "Skipping page number information in YJ."


(Note: YJ refers to Yellow Jersey, Amazon's internal code name for KFX.)

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Since you don't read on eink devices, you might not be aware of the progress bar at the bottom of the page on pre-touchscreen kindles. I really really miss that. (I certainly would have not minded if it could have been toggled off for those that did not want it.)

The progress bar (which can be off) on the current Kobo Firmware is a similar idea. Very unobtrusive.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by FrustratedReader

The progress bar (which can be off) on the current Kobo Firmware is a similar idea. Very unobtrusive.

Can you point me to a screenshot or a photo that does a good job of showing that?

Attached are some K4NT shots showing the bar and the bar plus location and one of them incidentally shows support for fractional page number display.