page break numbering - please explain

[church mouse]

I am hoping this is the correct section in which to paste this question, which is almost certainly very simple, but I know next to nothing about html and epub coding.

I have noticed that I have quite a number of books where the html has coding in it like this:

<?pagebreak number="2"?><a id="p2>

Often this coding can be found in the very middle of a sentence.

Some reading apps I have seem to ignore the coding and present the text correctly. However, others leave a space in the presented text where the coding exists in the html, thus presenting a sentence looking like this:

They came to bury poor King Edward, trundling handcarts over the cobbled streets or carrying tuck
boxes like little coffins.

My guess is that it is some form of coding which certain reader apps do not understand, but I am probably completely wrong. Can someone explain to me in very basic terms what is going on?

Thanks

[Turtle91]

My guess is that the <?pagebreak number="2"?> tag is your problem. That does not appear to be the standard method/tag to indicate a page number. Perhaps it is a software/reader specific tag??

In ePub3 it should look something like:

<span
         epub:type="pagebreak"
         id="page24"
         title="24"/>

ePub2 typically used the <a id="p2"/> (correction added) as a symantically incorrect workaround.


I would do a search and replace to remove all instances of the <?pagebreak?> tag...of course, make a backup first just in case...

[Turtle91]

...also.... make sure you don't have some kind of CSS that forces a line-break on your <a>. That would look something like: a {display:block}

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by church mouse

I have noticed that I have quite a number of books where the html has coding in it like this:

<?pagebreak number="2"?><a id="p2>

The first tag (<?pagebreak number="2"?>) is a processing instruction that all epub-compliant reading apps should ignore. The second tag (<a id="p2>) is page number target id, which is used by some ebook designers to identify page number targets. It also should be ignored by epub-compliant reading apps.

Unless you have epub3 books and a reader or app that supports epub3 books, you can ignore these tags.

(There are also some ADE epub2 books with print page number support that might use these tags, but they're relatively rare.)

For more information on page numbers, see the Page numbers Wiki entry.

[church mouse]

Thank you all for your replies, you are wonderful.

The stock reader apps in my various ereaders (Pocketbook, Kobo, Tolino, ES ProHD) have no problems, but non-standard reader apps such as Koreader, Coolreader, AlReader all create a space in the text matching the space of the coding, so I guess they are not fully epub compliant.

In one book I did edit it by removing the coding manually, but in the last couple of books there have been more than 200 entries per book and I do not know how to code to search and remove all the entries, so I just use a reader and app which displays correctly.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by church mouse

In one book I did edit it by removing the coding manually, but in the last couple of books there have been more than 200 entries per book and I do not know how to code to search and remove all the entries, so I just use a reader and app which displays correctly.

If you're familiar with Calibre Editor or Sigil (or another editor with regex support), you could use regular expressions to find these kinds of tags:

<\?[^>]+\?>

will find <?pagebreak number="2"?> (and all other processing instructions).

and

<a id="p\d+>[^<]*</a>

will find <a id="p2></a>, <a id="p3>3</a>, <a id="p4>4</a> etc.

[church mouse]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

If you're familiar with Calibre Editor or Sigil (or another editor with regex support), you could use regular expressions to find these kinds of tags:

<\?[^>]+\?>

will find <?pagebreak number="2"?> (and all other processing instructions).

and

<a id="p\d+>[^<]*</a>

will find <a id="p2></a>, <a id="p3>3</a>, <a id="p4>4</a> etc.

Thank you. I will give this a go.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by church mouse

Thank you. I will give this a go.

I have ONE comment, only--before you go bonkers and remove all those ids, I would be very careful to ensure that the book you're reading isn't using them, for index entry links, for "go to" comments inside the book, e.g., "See page 23 for a discussion of..." etc.

There's an excellent chance that the publisher wanted RPNs, for some reason (real page numbers or real page number functionality), and so the poor, overworked, beleaguered bookmaker put those in there as link targets--OR, to see if they could get Amazon to use the RPNs, rather than locations. yes, yes, I know, we're discussing ePUB, but after all, ePUB is often the parent to the concomitant MOBI.

Offered FWIW.

Hitch

[church mouse]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I have ONE comment, only--before you go bonkers and remove all those ids, I would be very careful to ensure that the book you're reading isn't using them, for index entry links, for "go to" comments inside the book, e.g., "See page 23 for a discussion of..." etc.

There's an excellent chance that the publisher wanted RPNs, for some reason (real page numbers or real page number functionality), and so the poor, overworked, beleaguered bookmaker put those in there as link targets--OR, to see if they could get Amazon to use the RPNs, rather than locations. yes, yes, I know, we're discussing ePUB, but after all, ePUB is often the parent to the concomitant MOBI.

Offered FWIW.

Hitch

Thanks Hitch, I am sure they are there for some reason other than to frustrate my reading experience, but in the current book I could see no useful purpose to the page ids for reading as an epub. Having now finished reading the book, I will take the opportunity to "mess" with a copy of it.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by church mouse

Thanks Hitch, I am sure they are there for some reason other than to frustrate my reading experience, but in the current book I could see no useful purpose to the page ids for reading as an epub. Having now finished reading the book, I will take the opportunity to "mess" with a copy of it.

Okay...I'm sure you know best. I just wanted to remind folks that typically, those serve a purpose.

Hitch

[JSWolf]

I see plenty of internal page numbers that serve no purpose. I've also seen some eBooks with page numbers in the NCX that also serve no purpose. I just remove all that. I've found that the better the code the less chance of a problem. I've read of many problems that probably is do to errors or poor code. I've also read of problems because of the excessive CSS code many publishers use. It's amazing that when I remove the excess CSS code, I can get hundreds of classes removed.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by church mouse

Thanks Hitch, I am sure they are there for some reason other than to frustrate my reading experience, but in the current book I could see no useful purpose to the page ids for reading as an epub. Having now finished reading the book, I will take the opportunity to "mess" with a copy of it.

Generally page numbers are used in textbooks for reference by page when the instructor needs to identify something. Of course a general purpose eBook could be used in a school setting. Some tools can actually use the page numbers to move through the book.

Dale