Footnotes: Best Practices?

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by DaveLessnau

@Tex2002ans: Thanks. I'll look over those links and recommendations you posted.

Ahh, and again, I was in the middle of expanding/editing that post. Make sure to recheck it for the latest info.

I linked to a few more problematic topics over the years.

(It felt like yesterday when those were first posted! :P)

Originally Posted by DaveLessnau

But, I think I'm going to end up following your advice of "give it up" (at least for my playing around with this book's code).

Good choice, good choice.

Just KISS!!! Keep It Simple, Stupid!!!

Originally Posted by DaveLessnau

I feel like I'm playing whac-a-mole or with Matryoshka dolls. Every time I think I've solved one problem, another pops up.

Yep, and many times, you aren't aware of alternate devices + ways of reading out there.

Like the past many years, I've been heavily relying on Text-to-Speech (TTS) to read my ebooks.

This made me even more aware of atrocious code and annoyances which might not bother a purely "visual" reader.

This is why I strongly stress marking things up properly (like Tables + Language + Emphasis/Italics) + using the proper characters (EN DASHES + EM DASHES + MINUS SIGNS).

When you use linear="no" and crap like that, it completely hides portions of the book which should be available/searchable.

It would be like someone ripping the endnotes chapter out of your physical book and sitting on it as you read.

Oh, you wanted to read a note? Too bad, let me get in your way and frustrate you, because I, as the publisher, know so much better than YOU. :P

Want me to put each footnote into its own HTML file? Because "I only want you to see a single note at a time"?

Let me cut those pages into little strips and hand them back to you one-by-one.

Needlessly crippling your ebooks and giving you the inferior product?

"No problem!" (says the dolt).

Originally Posted by davidfor

[...] footnotes on Kobo for kepubs. The specs for it are in https://github.com/kobolabs/epub-spe...kobo-platforms. And that includes a maximum of 5000 characters. After that, it gets treated as a link.

Thanks for that info. I always forget about their Github specs.

Originally Posted by theducks

Calibre's Viewer and many others that run on a PC are based upon web browsers.
THEY forgive way too many deviations from EPUB limitations.
All the experts will tell you: Test on the target devices..

Yep. Exactly.

Originally Posted by theducks

Just because it looks fine in Calibre , and it validates, does not mean you did not use something in your code that brand X ignores or gets wrong.

Yep. Always make sure it passes epubcheck as well.

Originally Posted by theducks

RMSDK was famous for ignoring the whole stylesheet if it had an error in one place.

Still does!