Black Box Around Endnotes and First Word for Each Endnote is Blue

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
September 4, 2024
4 replies
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I've made sure that text wrapping is off, I've looked at the ojbect styles and made sure that's alright, I've looked at character and paragraph styles, and I am absolutely flabbergasted at why I continue to see that thick, black box around my endnotes and why the start of each endnote is blue (including, per the screenshot, a continuation of an endnote from one page to the next).

I've looked around these forums to no avail (that's why I knew to try some of the things mentioned above). I didn't have this problem with my endnotes until recently. This is part of a series of booklets, so I usually copy/paste the old indesign file into the new booklet's folder and then start formatting on the copied file, so the settings haven't changed, so this is a new thing in my files. I'm on Indesign 19.5, in the US (if that matters), and I don't know a whole ton about this being self-taught and Google Search taught.

I'll take any help I can get. I'm dying here. Please and thank you.

Judaism_web_-_Copy.zip

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L

Laura Brady

Inspiring

The black frame is some default CSS styling from InDesign to EPUB which is annoying. If you can edit the CSS, look for border instructions and delete them entirely. The blue numbers are default hyperlinking styling. The footnote reference numbers have two-way hyperlinks from the text to the footnote and back again.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

A question I forgot to ask: was the content for this book created in/imported from Word? I am pretty sure that's the source of the black box in most cases, and the reason it's not seen in all InDesign EPUBs with end notes.

S

SammyReyReyAuthor

Participating Frequently

I copy/pasted from a .doc or a .docx. No importing though.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

What you are seeing are artifacts/elements introduced by the EPUB reader. They have (next to) nothing to do with anything you or InDesign is doing.

Some readers apply that black box around the Endnote frame, and IIRC it's not even a defined export/style element, but wholly created by the reader's rendering code. I can't remember offhand if a CSS statement can be used to suppress it. In any case, it will vary with the reader used — what reader are you using to view/proof your export?

Ditto for the blue numbers. They're links. Again, mostly a reader-applied effect, and can be difficult/impossible to override, at least on all readers.

S

SammyReyReyAuthor

Participating Frequently

Sure. But this has never happened before, I've not updated my eReader, I've not changed any settings in InDesign, and when I try to click on the blue text, it doesn't do anything (now that one might be the fault of the emulator and I'm decidedly less worried about that). I'm using Kindle Previewer 3. I'm totally fine with different readers having some oddities, or if this is a weird Adobe bug. But if I've done something wrong, I'd like to fix it. I have a work around for the black box thing, but i just hate the way it looks (and I'm prinicapally frustrated that it's happening lol). Any ideas...? I attached the epub--did you see a black box around the endnotes? Gotta ask. 🙂

I appreciate the help, by the way!! Apologies if I'm coming off as beligerent. I'm just at a loss.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

I don't know what you've done previously, but both effects/artifacts are common when end notes are exported to EPUB. Not universal — in fact, I just did a test export of a file I am pretty sure had the elements at one time, but it now does not create the black box. So it may be a version thing; if you haven't, update your copy of Kindle Previewer and see if the box goes away.

But the blue numbers are links. They are clickable in Thorium EPUB reader; links in Kindle Previewer can be oddly hit or miss in trying to click or activate, with Ctrl-click and sometimes a double-click needed. There is next to no way to get rid of the blue link highlighting — there are tricks at the CSS level, but if a reader is going to highlight links, very little can be done about it.

You can try this: assign a null Object Style to the Endnote text frames. Make it a completely vanilla clone of [None] and make sure it does not have any border or outer stroke defined, and no overrides. Then assign it to all Endnote text frames. That may kill the black outline. If not, we can throw a CSS formatting command at it.

In general, though, I wouldn't export to fixed-page EPUB, especially not for Kindle if you're headed that direction. FXL is outdated, a poor choice for "text" books (as opposed to "picture page" books), and does not display well or at all on dedicated Kindle readers. (Only the tablet and desktop readers can display FXL, making it unavailable to some large part of the Kindle audience.) If you're just proofing for EPUB, Kindle Previewer is a poor choice for that, since it's not EPUB and has many of its own rules. Use a generic EPUB reader such as Calibre instead.