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Old 02-18-2007, 12:09 PM   #1
readingaloud
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Footnotes, anyone?

I've made a truly startling discovery.

In eBooks, or at least the ones I make for my iLiad and Sony Reader, footnotes belong ... AT THE FOOT OF THE PAGE!

One of the problems with these readers is that they don't do well with the kind of back-and-forth page flipping you need for most reference books. There's nothing more annoying than seeing a footnote marker and not knowing where to find the information or whether it's even worth looking for. If you put the footnotes where the name implies, you can simply glance down the page and see whether you want to read the note, perhaps read it, and then go right back. It's mildly annoying when long notes need to be split to the following page, but at least you know where to go for them, and how to get back.

Having said this, I'm painfully aware that the only eBooks I've got that put footnotes in the right place are the ones that I've painstakingly created for myself, using InDesign. The commercial eBooks I have make footnotes into endnotes, and thus essentially inaccessible. That's where the notes are in most of the e-texts I find online, too, and it's a pain in the neck to move them to their proper places. Even where the note is interpolated into the text (usually at the end of the paragraph), it's a fussy process to get them put right.

But I like to make eBooks that look BETTER than paper books, and for me it's worth the effort.
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Old 02-18-2007, 01:10 PM   #2
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Well, using LaTeX and the \footnote{} command, books formatted on Feedboks do have footnotes at the foot of the page. Such a thing is only possible with a per-page format, PDF in this case.
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Old 02-18-2007, 01:39 PM   #3
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This is a problem with ebooks.

I always put footnotes immediately below the paragraph to which they refer.

I mark them with an asterisk (or two or three if there are more than one).
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Old 02-20-2007, 12:18 AM   #4
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Haha, I thought of the problem slightly differently and put the "footnotes" in a small popup window in the lrf. They display when you roll over the number. Works better with reflowable pages.
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Old 02-20-2007, 12:27 AM   #5
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That is a truly excellent solution, quantumskie. Can you offer any advice on how to set that up?
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Old 02-20-2007, 03:15 AM   #6
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I'd love to see an example too... I wasn't able to get PopUpWindow work on the Reader (it worked on Librie).
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Old 02-20-2007, 08:43 AM   #7
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I only have a Librié and not a Sony Reader and if igorsk says it doesn't work with the reader, then I guess that this may not be an option. I have uploaded an example file with the popup window nevertheless and you can download it here.
On the Librié you can press the "戻る" button to erase the pop up after you have scrolled over the superscript.
If you'll like to see the lrs source, it's here. It won't compile directly as you'll need to change the CThumbnail tag to a valid thumbnail file.
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Old 02-20-2007, 08:52 AM   #8
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Yep, you can't even highlight the link on Reader.
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Old 02-20-2007, 10:53 AM   #9
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Ah. I see. Does that mean that all the Char Buttons don't work?
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Old 02-20-2007, 11:45 AM   #10
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Bummer.
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