I have two questions in regards to inline footnotes that are displayed in EPUB compile.
(1) When viewing the Epub text and the inline footnote, the footnote number itself is in very small text and is hard to see. Is it possible to increase the font size of the inline footnote number that is shown in the text or change it to bold text so it is more visible to the eye. I should add that this is not the footnotes themselves but the footnote number that is shown in the text.
(2) Is it possbile to change where the footnotes are shown currently i have more than one book in the Epub output and the footnotes are shown as follows.
Not something that has ever concerned me, but through all my reading of the posts in these forums, I suspect that is something that you would have to sort out by editing the epub in Calibre or Sigil.
Yes, there is no built-in option for that, it would take some post-production work to come up with an arrangement like that. It would not be a trivial task either, given how footnotes work in an e-book. Each one is a hyperlink pointing to a particular spot in a specific file, so if you split the footnotes file into three different files, all of the corresponding hyperlinks in the source text that point to the new footnote file would need to be revised. Sigil does have a good search and replace tool that would probably help a lot with that.
As an aside, most readers aren’t going to notice that the footnotes are all in one batch given how you interface with them. You tap the number, it takes the reader to the note, then they can hit the back button on their device or tap a corresponding back-link from the footnote. It doesn’t matter if the footnote is at the front, back or middle of the book if you jump to and from it in a non-linear fashion.
But, if you insert footnotes into the middle of the text stream, so that they are sandwiched between books, readers will notice that. Once you finish book one and press “Next” on your device, you’ll get footnotes, maybe pages and pages of footnotes before getting to the next book. Personally I’d rather go straight from the end of book one to the beginning of book two. In a paper book that’s not as big a deal as you can rifle through a dozen pages or so and easily find the next major title page, but when each flip requires a screen refresh (on e-ink especially) and can only be done one at a time, that’s a chore.
Just my two cents as a reader, take it or leave it.
It sounds like you have the Reduce marker font size option enabled in the Footnotes & Comments compile option pane. With that enabled you will get something like this in the text:
With the option disabled, there will be no special CSS or span generated around the markers, and the rendering of the element will be down to the ePub engine you’re viewing it with.
Well in the Layout compile pane there is an option at the bottom to enable custom CSS (typically used for screenplays). You could probably override how the element works from there. Trying to customise the span classes will be difficult since those are numerically assigned in the order that formatting appears.
Have you tried a few different viewers though? As I mentioned, there may be some default formatting in whatever you’re using to preview, that isn’t what you’d see on other devices or software. In Adobe Digital Editions, the engine used by most ePub readers, I get a normal-sized marker, same for iBooks.
