Psuedo-chapters as page breaks

[grNadpa]

I'd like your thoughts on my page-breaking strategy and how best to verify the result.

My understanding is that page breaks (per se) are not a feature of e-books. (Seemingly confirmed by AoiHana's 10-13-2020 post entitled "reliable picture layout ...".)

But following Hitch's suggestion to use the Kindle viewer (thank you again!), I find that my heavily illustrated instruction manual breaks pages in rather inconvenient places. Since I am reconstructing my hard-copy book into xml-xhml and css format, I'm considering rendering each page break as its own .xhtml file -- with the thought that I can edit the toc to contain only the true chapters.

I'm encouraged by gmw 05-15-17 post entitled "lots of short chapters" that this multi-file strategy may not be as bizarre an idea as I first thought.

If it is worth a shot, the second part of my question is how to concatenate the multiple files for loading into the Kindle viewer. I really don't relish the days it will take to create a full-blown e-book before I know whether the strategy does what I hope.

[retiredbiker]

Originally Posted by grNadpa

rendering each page break as its own .xhtml file -- with the thought that I can edit the toc to contain only the true chapters.

That is indeed best practice, and about the only way of guaranteeing where breaks appear on a reader. And yes, the ToC can be edited to show just the actual chapters.

[grNadpa]

Originally Posted by retiredbiker

That is indeed best practice

Oops. I published too soon following the advice of another who pooh-poohed the idea.

Good to know going forward though. Thank you for taking the time to respond. Perhaps others will find this post for their efforts.

And, should the opportunity present itself again, I will certainly heed your advice and encouragement.

Regards,
grNadpa

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by retiredbiker

That is indeed best practice, and about the only way of guaranteeing where breaks appear on a reader. And yes, the ToC can be edited to show just the actual chapters.

Yes, but I have this horrible feeling he means, throughout. Like, constantly throughout, rather than on the odd occasion.

If you try to read books like this, where someone has manually caused pages to break, roughly following the original print layout, it's a damned nightmare. And how does @grNadpa "know" where those pages are breaking, inconveniently or otherwise? Were they tested, at all font sizes, on all devices, in all device orientations?

I feel like this is a solution in search of a problem. The entire point of not going with PDFs, as eBooks, was for reflowability. Not a stranglehold on the reader's devices.

At that point, why not just do fixed-layout and call it a day?

Hitch