RussellHltn wrote:Not having an iPhone, I'm not sure what the issue is. Revel on Android uses the mature Yanceybooks file format. Footnotes appears much like it does in the printed scriptures - with a hyperlinked (blue underlined) superscript letter. Tapping the hyperlink brings up the footnote as a small overlay window which may or may not contain more hyperlinks.
A tap of the "back" button (part of the Android user interface) backs out of the footnote.
The current approach parses each footnote into a list of footnote entries, and then displays that list Reveal-style as a dialog box above the chapter text. For each entry in the list, if it has a hyperlink, the corresponding list item is clickable to navigate to the link target (Reveal style). As I mentioned in the first post, the problems are three-fold, and they're marginal (the current approach works most of the time):
- The current approach throws away some connective text between scripture-reference hyperlinks. Often this is just punctuation such as semicolons or commas, but sometimes it includes words too.
- The current approach attaches footnotes to verses, but not all footnotes are attached to verses (out of the thousands of footnotes, only half a dozen are not attached to verses).
- There is no way to browse the footnotes the way you can browse them in the printed scriptures -- as a group.
The footnotes have been written as if they would generally be displayed in sentence-style lists. So there is sometimes connective text and pre-/post-footnote text that helps it read like a sentence. A good example is Gen. 1:1c:
c HEB shaped, fashioned, created; always divine activity; see Abr. 4:1, organized, formed. TG Creation; God, Creator.
We currently display this as the following list:
- HEB shaped, fashioned, created; always divine activity; see
- Abr. 4:1
- TG Creation
- God, Creator
Close, and indeed structurally correct (the last three items link to the appropriate targets), but missing some of the finer details of the footnote (it's not clear that the list is Gen. 1:1c; it's not immediately clear that "God, Creator" is a TG link; some of the connective text is missing, including words and punctuation; and the surrounding footnote context is not visible -- you have to go back and tap on the other footnotes to view them).
A few possible solutions:
- Improve the footnote parser so it doesn't throw away connective text (including punctuation) and is smarter about where to break list items (e.g., putting "see" with "Abr. 4:1" and keeping ", organized, formed." in the example above). Also would require changes to handle footnotes not attached to verses. This only solves some of the problems.
- Use either the iPhone or WebOS approach to display footnotes in sentence style, inlined with chapter text or in a separate panel below the chapter text. (BTW, see the iPhone project screencast for an example of how it works.)
- Display footnotes in sentence style rather than list style, but still in a floating dialog box above the chapter text. Links would be underlined web-style, rather than being broken out into a vertical list of selectable items. The user could scroll the window to see all footnotes for the chapter.