Pages from paper edition

[theducks]

Originally Posted by wonderose

I appreciate your suggestions! Yes, modifying EPUBs manually or using a script is a possibility, but let’s be honest—that’s not the ideal solution. What I’m advocating for is a simple toggle in the settings of an existing, widely used software. A solution that doesn’t require users to dive into regex, Python scripts, or EPUB editing just to access something as fundamental as real page numbers.

I also don’t believe I’m just a lone voice in the wilderness. Many academics and researchers working with EPUBs likely share this frustration. Right now, it feels like standing in front of a grand building with many doors—yet only one is unlocked, and only if I personally jimmy it open each morning with custom scripts and manual work. That’s not the optimal path; that’s the workaround we take when the better option isn’t available.

Wouldn’t it be better if the door were simply unlocked for everyone?

And why do THEY refuse to modernize?
This is the 21st century. We do not use Clay Tablets or Scrolls regularly.
Chapter (section) : Paragraph: Sentance does not care what Zoom or Font

(and other than manually counting, Tablet: (column): Paragraph: sentence still works )

[wonderose]

Here’s the thing: a 60-year-old humanities professor with an office full of printed books might only know one way to reference texts - but software doesn’t have to be that limited.
Why should a tool designed for flexibility insist on only one way forward? It’s much easier for software to be inclusive than to expect an entire academic tradition to adapt overnight, especially when publishers aren’t exactly making things easier either.
And at the risk of getting too philosophical: the future isn’t always one-directional.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

And why do THEY refuse to modernize?
This is the 21st century. We do not use Clay Tablets or Scrolls regularly.

Ahem, web pages and re-flowable e-books are very much based on the model of the papyrus scroll. I'm told, TBL has even admitted to that.

BR

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by wonderose

Here’s the thing: a 60-year-old humanities professor with an office full of printed books might only know one way to reference texts - but software doesn’t have to be that limited.
Why should a tool designed for flexibility insist on only one way forward? It’s much easier for software to be inclusive than to expect an entire academic tradition to adapt overnight, especially when publishers aren’t exactly making things easier either.
And at the risk of getting too philosophical: the future isn’t always one-directional.

Use PDF and a large screen ereader if you must insist on page numbers. People insisting on re-fighting the ONE TRUE PAGE NUMBERS wars on a regular basis is ridiculous in this day and age.

To misquote a misattribution: Let them read PDF!

[wonderose]

This is the use case.

A book is published in two formats: as a printed volume and as an EPUB, the latter including the page numbers of the printed edition. A PDF version, however, is not made available.
The book is academically relevant and needs to be cited. On Windows, Calibre viewer is used. However, the software does not display the printed page numbers with sufficient accuracy. It remains unclear whether one should cite page 222 or 223.
Maintaining compatibility with the printed edition is crucial, since the printed word - and with it, the printed page - still dominates in the relevant academic community.
Because precision and reliability are old-fashioned virtues that remain essential even in modern scholarship, a post is written in this forum. The hope is that the “Pages from paper edition” feature can be improved. A suggestion is made: a simple toggle in the settings to display the printed page number inside the text.

Unfortunately, this has not been met with a positive response. Still, the attempt has been made.

[DNSB]

And I still say that if you want page numbers for an ebook, go with a page oriented format which means PDF.

As I said, I did modify an ePub for one person. It took a bit of work since he was not happy with having the page number displayed centered on a page since it looked fugly and could be widowed or orphaned. The next step was adding a page break before the page number so the page number was always at the top of a page but that ran into issues with his ereader having issues with the break-before/page-break-before in the CSS stylesheet.

Basically, I grabbed the span that IDed the page and modified it to display the page number centered on the page using a bit of regex to grab the paragraphs starting and ending code, the words before and after the existing span and the page number from the title. Quick and dirty and some cleanup was needed.

all <span epub:type="pagebreak" id="page_87" title="87"></span>you

all </p>
<p class="center bold"><span epub:type="pagebreak" id="page_87" title="87"></span>87</p>
<p class="para>you