Kindle Previewer 3 gives error message regarding bad links

[Tom Tomasko]

Hello,

I am creating an ebook and testing out things in Kindle Previewer 3. I get an error message that two endnotes need "Please update a valid external URL. " This seems weird because scores of endnotes have dead links and I want them to remain that way. But Kindle says two of them are bad when actually all of them are "bad."

Any ideas on how I can fix this so I do not get these error messages?

Thanks.

Tom

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

End notes are a huge PITA in EPUB and Kindle. They're kind of like those two-foot blown-glass sailing ships you see at fairs.. no one is ever going to get one home intact. 🙂

Does the error identify which notes are causing the error? Or is it just some pair among the many?

[Tom Tomasko]

Yes, the error identifies the two "errors." I am not sure this has anything to do with the fact that they are endnotes.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

If you know which two entries are causing the problem, delete them (both reference and note, if necessary) and re-enter them.

You might want to try the ID purge-fix first: save the file to IDML, then open and save that as an INDD file under a new name. Try the export again. Then try the fix above, and try the export again. Somewhere in there, the links should be unkinked.

That purge helps a lot of EPUB export faults, especially when a file has many links (TOC, index, cross-ref, end note) and is edited substantially after those links are created. Some breakages from editing are tolerated internally — that is, a print version would show no problems — but EPUB export is so fussy that trivial faults will throw such errors.

[Tom Tomasko]

What a mess. Deleting and then pasting back in the offending text did nothing. Saving as idml did work except a different piece of text that is a dead link to a website now surfaces. And I lost the links to my (few) footnotes. Time to take a break.

Just went back to my original. Everything works but I get messages in Quality Check that the footnotes are not backlinked. But they are working.

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

Did this book originate in Word, and then import to ID? That's another whole chain of possible faults.

When you replace the footnotes, or any time you do that kind of step, it's critical to make sure you delete everything that could contain a bad link. If, for example, you have a footnote at the end of a paragraph, cut ALL the text of about the last sentence in the first para and the first one in the second and delete it from the document. That should remove the footnote, the reference any any stray bits of a broken or orphaned link.

THEN paste the text back in using a "plain text" option; the best trick might be to paste it into Notepad, then cut and paste it from there. That keeps old 'crud' from getting pasted back in.

THEN insert a new footnote and paste similarly clean text into it.

A lot of steps but it does little good to cut and paste a broken or orphaned link back into the doc.

[Tom Tomasko]

The book is InDesign. I took your advice in your book . I am killing the footnotes by putting them in the text at the end of the paragraph where they are called out and using CSS to make them look different. Your book is very thorough and I'll have to refer to it again and again.

One futher question on Kindle Previewer 3. The Excel chart that KP3 listing the errors very nicely gives the location of the error. But KP3 does not go to that exact location. It gives the start of a page. For instance, the error is in location 789. But the navigator in KP3 will only show 735. Then I need to guess where a problem might be.

Tom

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Thanks - glad you find the info useful. I've never much cared for how e-readers handle footnotes, hence that inline style. I don't find it obtrusive (no more obtrusive than bottom-of-the-page notes) and it completely bypasses all of the live-link and pop-up issues. Maybe one day we'll get a real e-reader that can handle a more natural reading/page experience. 🙂

If you have a pointer to the page, it's not too hard to pull the XHTML file out of the EPUB and look within the adjacent code. It does take some HTML experience, but you can often spot what's broken, which can be a guide to fixing it at the export stage.

But both footnotes and endnotes persist in being about 80% of the problems with getting to EPUB. I am not sure why except that both Word and ID have some learning to do about HTML link exports.