Monday, September 10, 2012

pop-up footnotes in iBooks with Sigil

Liz Castro describes the basics of getting pop-up footnotes to work in iBooks but lacking an epub3 editor this feature is hard to explore. As a workaround, the current (epub2) versions of Sigil can produce epubs with pop-up footnotes that work in iBooks if the appropriate (epub) namespace is declared. e.g. here is the complete xhtml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops">
<head>
<title>Book</title>
</head>

<body>
<p>worthy of a footnote <a epub:type="noteref" href="#ref">[ref]</a></p>

<p epub:type="footnote" id="ref">the footnote</p>
</body>
</html>

Sigil doesn't honor the <aside> tag, but styling <p> or <div> with "display:none" gives the same effect.

The resulting epub doesn't pass epubcheck but does work ok in iBooks.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

iBooks body margin contortions


 One annoying aspect of iBooks is how much whitespace is wasted on the margins of the body text. Applying background colors (cyan and yellow respectively) you can see that the <body> element is contained within the <html> element. 

It's possible, though, to squeeze a little more space (10 pixels on a retina display) out on the left by adjusting the left margin by 5 (CSS) pixels. For images, 5 pixels means 5 screen pixels as seen above.

On the right side, it turns out that setting "width:100%" on the body element, which you'd expect would be innocuous, actually pushes the the right side a little beyond the <html> edge, so things get clipped.
So presumably replacing "100%" with the appropriate pixel value would get you exactly to the edge...