Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home, just please pick up after yourselves. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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I would love to make more ebooks, but besides not having energy and adhd, I keep wondering how to do (e.g.) footnotes and end up in a rabbit hole of trying to look into it. This is the Nth time I have ended up on this exact fucking thread EDIT: it I have it bookmarked ffs! And I just end up with “fuck it, just do something” in the end.
There is a longer rant about EPUBs and HTML and CSS that if we had been irl I’d probably done, but I don’t have it in me to do in text. I’m sure you already have an idea, you can practically track the times I’ve opened up an EPUB to work on it by just looking for when I complain about this shit.
I would love to have others help me do EPUBs… but as you can see it’s difficult.
In short, what’s the best practices for EPUB? I have no fucking clue, and I only keep becoming more
I empathize with your pain, comrade. Even in my reading list I’m still not sure what “best practices” would be, be it formatting, commentary, what to include, what to exclude, the finer nuances are hard to come up with! For what it’s worth, the way you have them in Dialectical Materialism are my preference: bottom of the page the footnote appears on, trailing onto the next page if necessary without extending to the next paragraph until the page after the footnotes are done, and with the footnotes stored at the end of the book.
I’m not sure if it’s standard or not, but it’s very readable on mobile and on an eReader, with easy-to-find references, so I like it!
I’d be of little help other than a springboard for HTML and CSS discussions, but if I can help, please let me know!
Also if I were absolutely evil I would love it if Rev 3 could be entirely comlib works, but that’s an incredible amount of work to ask of volunteers and entirely unreasonable. If you find yourself wanting to do more books and are looking for examples, I can always give suggestions from the list I make, but I’m never going to ask you outright to do that because that’s an awful lot of work.
This is not me (per say), this is… I think you use KoReader? I do and I make my EPUBs with it in mind, and if I’m unsure I’ll test things on it. But it’s nothing more than the internal structure being tagged correctly for this to work in e.g. KoReader. Calibre will do a popup, and I mention that because these two are in my mind in one category of how readers deal with footnotes, the other category (at least that I know of) is that they… don’t, the user has to click the footnote (which is a link) and be taken to the footnote (and the somehow get back to the previous location). And I try to keep both in mind, and make something that will hopefully work for both of them. And then there is pandoc in the back of my mind, which understands footnotes (again when correctly tagged) but with at minimum the caveat that the footnote has to be internally in the same file (epubs are just ZIP files with primarily html files inside) and so should I keep the footnotes at the end of each chapter like I’ve done sometimes, but then in that mobileread thread someone was complaining “If there is anything I can’t stand, it is getting to the end of a chapter’s actual content and finding page after page of footnotes clogging it up before the next chapter” asdasjidbsoidjfhgasdoiufghasdoiufha<sdlfkhsidlofhjvasodufhiasdlifuh
And this is just footnotes, don’t get me started on other shit. Like, say you want to make a leader, you know, a thing that has existed for probably decades in print, support for some kind of it exists in CSS3, but KoReader does not support that IIRC. And that leads me to one of the problems, HTML/CSS engines
because (for example) KoReader uses the CoolReader engine, which is a custom engine rather than like Chromium or Firefox or Safaris engines, which one the one hand is good, but leads to incomplete and differing completenes of implementation of HTML/CSS stuff. It’s like what I’ve heard the fucking 90s were all over again! And I have no idea what other weird HTML/CSS engines are out there in other readers, so who knows what I am doing that is actually not working on someones tablet.
Okay, fair enough, I’m far out of my depth on this one lol. The point is that I am deeply empathetic to the struggle, and that’s why I can’t rightly ask for anything.
Only other option (if this even helps) is doing it like Standard Ebooks does it, with multiple formats of epub.
Standard Ebooks looks like they have some idea of what they’re doing, I can probably learn something from them.
It’s where I check first for public domain fiction! Seems it’s run by liberals, but the fiction is great and well-formatted. I dunno about behind the scenes though.