Best practice for Outlining and Splitting

[mrmikel]

You are right, of course. I guess I was thinking of the case with a giant footnote popping up at the bottom of a page and how it might be handled. So much depends on whether the footnote is worth the trouble or is just a citation. Right now I don't know there is a solution. On a page, you can glance to the bottom, but in a e book, you don't know what you are going to get.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Agama

You're correct. I mentioned this in post #4, , but I think you have pointed out more clearly the advantage of keeping them in the same chapter.

Maybe this thread should get closed, so that it doesn't eat up any more space on MR's server/s.

You are too kind. I knew someone had, and was too lazy, and too irritated about another thread, rather than this one, to go look. My bad.

Hitch

[mrmikel]

Maybe someone ought to open a thread about the philosophy of creation of ebooks that could go on endlessly and contain all discussions of that sort. That would allow the other threads to deal with substantial issues.

Since there are no perfect devices, it is quite difficult enough to figure out real and sometimes ugly ways of making the readers display the books.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

Maybe someone ought to open a thread about the philosophy of creation of ebooks that could go on endlessly and contain all discussions of that sort. That would allow the other threads to deal with substantial issues.

Since there are no perfect devices, it is quite difficult enough to figure out real and sometimes ugly ways of making the readers display the books.

mrmikel:

I think that that is an excellent idea. It would be far better than this sort of scatter-shot approach. ;-)

Hitch

[PeterT]

Maybe we need a "Best Practices for Best Practices" thread?

[mrmikel]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Maybe we need a "Best Practices for Best Practices" thread?

You get my vote!

It would be very useful for students stuck in courses with this sort of focus. (Reminds me of the movie, "Back to School" with Rodney Dangerfield. "Where are we going to build this factory?" Comment from Dangerfield:"Fantasyland.")

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Maybe we need a "Best Practices for Best Practices" thread?

There was a thread back in April: "List of epub formatting "don'ts":

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=211831

Although seeing how that turned out, it reached a point where many were attacking other's DOs and DON'Ts. Still some good tips in there, just that some get lost in the bickering back and forth.

I still stand by all my PNG statements.

[eping]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

You are right, of course. I guess I was thinking of the case with a giant footnote popping up at the bottom of a page and how it might be handled. So much depends on whether the footnote is worth the trouble or is just a citation. Right now I don't know there is a solution. On a page, you can glance to the bottom, but in a e book, you don't know what you are going to get.

No problem, pop up a window like showing the explanation from a dictionary, if too much, just add pages in the popped up window. Now all ereader can handle dictionary, so no tech problem on popping up notes.

Footnote, also no problem, there's a book view mode in MS Word from 2003, all footnotes are arranged properly on each page, the problem is if the ereader developer(such as Adobe) would write the code in the software.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by eping

Footnote, also no problem, there's a book view mode in MS Word from 2003, all footnotes are arranged properly on each page, the problem is if the ereader developer(such as Adobe) would write the code in the software.

Footnotes can be a real problem even in paper books. Not the occasional two-line footnote, of course, but the scholarly/critical editions, with sometimes tens of footnotes per page, some of them several pages long (even with reduced font size), and with footnotes inside footnotes inside footnotes... Pop-up notes would be perfect in this case, though.

[eping]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Footnotes can be a real problem even in paper books. Not the occasional two-line footnote, of course, but the scholarly/critical editions, with sometimes tens of footnotes per page, some of them several pages long (even with reduced font size), and with footnotes inside footnotes inside footnotes... Pop-up notes would be perfect in this case, though.

Very simple, it's problem on paper, but not problem on screen, easy for programming.
Just set a limitation of lines of footnotes, such as 5, (or percentage of screen height). If footnote exceeds 5 lines, then at the end of footnotes add ...(more) and a small button or link, for user to pop up a window to read whole footnote.

Still, the problem is, they just don't do it. ( I mean the software developer for ereaders, such as Adobe)

[DomesticExtremis]

Originally Posted by eping

Very simple, it's problem on paper, but not problem on screen, easy for programming.
Just set a limitation of lines of footnotes, such as 5, (or percentage of screen height). If footnote exceeds 5 lines, then at the end of footnotes add ...(more) and a small button or link, for user to pop up a window to read whole footnote.

Still, the problem is, they just don't do it. ( I mean the software developer for ereaders, such as Adobe)

Well the epub3 rendering on Kobos does exactly that.
Epubs can be 'koboified' (which triggers the use of the
epub3 engine) using a Calibre plugin

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by eping

Very simple, it's problem on paper, but not problem on screen, easy for programming.
Just set a limitation of lines of footnotes, such as 5, (or percentage of screen height). If footnote exceeds 5 lines, then at the end of footnotes add ...(more) and a small button or link, for user to pop up a window to read whole footnote.

Still, the problem is, they just don't do it. ( I mean the software developer for ereaders, such as Adobe)

It's not quite that simple. What the reader does to display (or even "page" the larger) footnotes would certainly not have to be very complicated--I agree. But there does need to be something done on the part of the content creator to indicate to the rendering engine that THIS is a footnote. It can't just popup-ify all links it encounters after all (think ToC). So there's going to need to be some sort of consensus about what the code looks like the represents a footnote link ... as well as a consensus on how the target code (the part that's actually going to be popped up) should be formatted. So while I agree that it doesn't have to be complicated at all, it would probably be best if it was standardized in some manner.

Of course that won't happen. All devices/apps will handle pop-up footnotes slightly proprietarily (as we're already beginning to see), meaning content creators will have even more work involved in providing consistent source code for wide-spread distribution of the exact same content.

[Agama]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

It's not quite that simple. What the reader does to display (or even "page" the larger) footnotes would certainly not have to be very complicated--I agree. But there does need to be something done on the part of the content creator to indicate to the rendering engine that THIS is a footnote. It can't just popup-ify all links it encounters after all (think ToC). So there's going to need to be some sort of consensus about what the code looks like the represents a footnote link ... as well as a consensus on how the target code (the part that's actually going to be popped up) should be formatted. So while I agree that it doesn't have to be complicated at all, it would probably be best if it was standardized in some manner.

There does seem to be some hope for standardisation of footnotes in the ePub3 specification.

See http://www.idpf.org/accessibility/gu...html/notes.php

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Agama

There does seem to be some hope for standardisation of footnotes in the ePub3 specification.

See http://www.idpf.org/accessibility/gu...html/notes.php

I'd like to dare to hope. I really would. But then I remember the standard defined for page headers and footers in ePub2 so long ago.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'd like to dare to hope. I really would. But then I remember the standard defined for page headers and footers in ePub2 so long ago.

Mhmpf.

I've been sitting here cogitating upon how I could ever politely address this without sounding like the bitter cynic I am. ;-) However, methinks the likelihood of this being adapted, across the board, is slim. That's my entire contribution to the subject. I fully expect to be pulling my hair out, by the handfuls, before Spring of 2014, having to use one type of coding for footnotes on X, and one for Y, and a third for Amazon. My seriously devout prayers to the God of Bezos is that they refine media queries, it's my only hope not to take up permanent residence in Bellevue.

Hitch