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I really like this proposal. Just last night, I was reading an EPUB of The Hobbit and clicked on a footnote, which instructed me to refer to page 24. It turned
by sotix 3y ago
I really like this proposal. Just last night, I was reading an EPUB of The Hobbit and clicked on a footnote, which instructed me to refer to page 24. It turned out that it meant page 24 of the printed edition of the book, which was in the first chapter of the book. Page 24 in the EPUB was still part of the prologue. So I had no idea which page it was referencing. As it stands, my Kobo has an increased font size, so I notice that I can flip the page a few times and still be on page 4 before it finally turns to page 5, which I assume is referencing the pages of the written text. This is a nice compromise, but doesn't solve the issue with the hard coded footnote being misleading.
I wonder if we could instead look at religious texts such as the Bible (e.g. John 3:16) and code editors (e.g. Ln 4, Col 12) for referencing locations in reflowable text. The same way you can jump to a footnote in a document should allow you to have an actionable reference to a specific location anywhere in the text. But I don't think the text should be stylized like how the Bible has the numbers (e.g. 16) scattered within the text itself. Those should probably be hidden within the text and leave the reading software to display the first line number of the page down at the bottom instead of the page number. That might look like "4" the same as it currently does, but this 4 references a section of the text rather than a page number. Perhaps it could be togglable for greater detail and display word 23 of section 4 as "4:23". Or maybe it could consider the chapter too. For example, chapter 2 section 4, word 23 would look like "2, 4:23". This might get funky in a Terry Pratchett novel, but it would hopefully allow for easier discussion of exact parts in a document and significantly easier linking.
I love the interactive code example for marking up The Rust Programming Language. That gets at what I was saying above although is more targeted at a document than referencing parts of a novel.
Kudos to author for creating Bene[0] as part of this proposal. That was cool to discover I was using their tool to read the proposal itself!
[0] https://github.com/nota-lang/bene/ https://github.com/nota-lang/bene/