how to create original page nav in epub

[osprofi]

Hello epub readers
I am new to epub creation.
I want to realise a page navigation which replicates original book page navigation. I inserted therefore a span element with the pagenum and an associated page-break before css property. Unfortunatly this does not work reading the epub.

Can you tell me how this can be achieved in epub ebooks ?
Thanks, regards, franz

[HarryT]

Moved to the ePub forum.

[HarryT]

You mean you want to preserve the pagination of the paper book in an ePub file? That's just not going to work; different reading device can display enormously different amounts of text on a page. Compare reading your book on a 25" monitor on a PC, and reading the same book on a phone with a 3.5" screen!

[RbnJrg]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You mean you want to preserve the pagination of the paper book in an ePub file? That's just not going to work; different reading device can display enormously different amounts of text on a page. Compare reading your book on a 25" monitor on a PC, and reading the same book on a phone with a 3.5" screen!

But maybe by adding a page-map.xml file to his epub, he could duplicate the lenght of pages of his printed book. Of course, the text showed in the screen of the reader device will not match the text in a page of the printed copy; that is not possible. But he will be able to "jump" -in the epub- to the same page of the printed copy.

[mrmikel]

If it is for yourself or a small group, make a PDF out of it.

You can't preserve the layout, just as HarryT says. This is an issue even between 10" screens and 5" screens.

You can put in an endless supply of links to different locations which replicate the references, but what a pain. It also brings up where do you put foot/end notes?
Within each chapter tends to work better, since the machine can stay in the same file. But many works refer to notes at the end of a book.

Since the bottom of the page can not be predicted, you can insert footnotes immediately following the paragraph in which they are referenced, if they aren't too long.

How to overcome these and other similar obstacles has been the fodder for extended discussions in these forums.

[osprofi]

Hi
thanks for your quick responses
1) I read in an articles that I have to divide the content files into chunks which equal the page content and then reference in the spine element. This seems hurrible work.
2) I agree that having diff screen sizes the page outlook will be different. This is maybe solved with some css formatting ?
Do you have an opinion here?
Thanks for responding; regards; franz

[mrmikel]

Use Sigil. It simplifies matters greatly. You just need to put the text in and it will handle all the references. But it takes some knowledge of the process.

However, since you don't seem to know a lot of html or css, you might consider Atlantic Word Processor or Jutoh, which will allow you to work in a word processor and then when you are happy with it, publish the work to an epub.

CSS formatting will not stop the reader from changing the size of the text and thereby changing the page.

If you are a Windows user and a user of Word of recent vintage, Toxaris has made an add on which will create a basic epub from the word document.

Pablo has a tutorial on the website which covers basic epub and if you read the Sigil documentation, you might get an idea of how things go.

If you just want to convert some text to an epub, you can use calibre. It functions well, but it puts in a lot of its own formatting which is not so easy to understand for editing after conversion. It makes guesses where your chapters are and so, which are adjustable.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by osprofi

1) I read in an articles that I have to divide the content files into chunks which equal the page content and then reference in the spine element.

You can add page number references with <a id="xxx"> tags to the .html files and add a <pageList> section to the .ncx file.
However, not all readers and reading apps support pageLists, because they're not defined in the ePub2 standard.
You can also include an ADE page-map file, but this will only work with ADE/RMSDK readers and apps.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by osprofi

Hi
thanks for your quick responses
1) I read in an articles that I have to divide the content files into chunks which equal the page content and then reference in the spine element. This seems hurrible work.
2) I agree that having diff screen sizes the page outlook will be different. This is maybe solved with some css formatting ?

Files should be broken into chunks because there are ereaders that cannot handle content files which are too large. However, you should divide the content files into 1 file = 1 chapter, and that will take care of creating pagebreaks to separate each chapter.

css will not solve the different screen sizes issue, but does it really need fixing? ebooks are a different paradigm altogether from paper books. Page numbers are meaningless except as a reference to locations within the paper copy of the book. The rule for ebooks is to just divide up the chapters and let the ereader create the "pages" -- it is how basically all ebooks are made.

By using the PageList you can create a page number index that Amazon will use to generate page numbers; by using Page-map, Adobe-based readers/apps will generate page numbers as well.

If you don't need to reference a paper book, you can just ignore these altogether.