Disable popup footnotes, hiding the note contents only in some cases is confusing (aside + footnote semantics only, not endnotes) #2833
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Hello, thank you for the bug report! This is now fixed in the |
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Have I understood it correctly that you have changed the wording from "Disable footnotes" to "Disable popup footnotes"? The behavior is still confusing. We would prefer that all notes are always visible, also when the Disable (popup) footnotes is unticked. |
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Hello, "popup footnotes" is an EPUB3 feature. Thorium overrides the default link activation / click behaviour by intercepting the navigation event (which would normally take the user to the end of the current document, or to another document in the ebook spine). If the referenced note content is located inside an aside element and marked with one of the correct semantic roles of "note", then the aside becomes hidden (CSS display=none). Some EPUBs don't use the correct semantics on the note link and/or the note content, so without specific details about your use-case I cannot tell with certainty whether there is a bug in Thorium's implementation / interpretation of the specification. Could you please clarify? Thank you very much :) |
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PS: my email is [email protected] if you are allowed to share an EPUB privately so I can run tests at my end. |
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I will send you the epub in an email. In it, you can see that the footnotes are located inside aside elements, but the endnotes are not. For a reader, we think it will be confusing that footnotes "disappear" when the popup is enabled, while the endnotes don't. |
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I think that the rationale for hiding footnotes that are reachable via the "popup footnotes" mechanism (instead of plain hyperlinking) is that there is need to allocate screen real estate (i.e. document space) for content that is presented in a "special way" (dismissable modal popup dialog overlay). But I need to dig deeper into your particular EPUB so I can understand the confusion. Let's improve this! :) |
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Linda, your EPUB is very helpful, thank you :) So, there are note links ( There is indeed an inconsistency: Thorium only hides I will investigate further in the code to double-check my assumptions. This is not a bug per-se, but the inconsistency is clearly problematic for end users. Unfortunately the EPUB specification is quite vague on this topic, there is basically no strict standard, there is just an expectation from publishers / users that Reading Systems support the "popup" style of notes. Apple:
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danielweck
changed the title
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Lots of debating around the lack of interoperability in reading systems: https://www.google.com/search?q=epub+popup+footnotes+aside+site:www.mobileread.com |
For Epub publications, under Display, when Disable footnotes is checked, the footnotes are shown and when Disable footnotes is unchecked, the footnotes are not shown. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? It is difficult to understand what this means. Perhaps the wording could be changed to “Hide footnotes” and the default setting would be unticked.
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