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Endnotes not linking epub export

Contributor ,
Apr 04, 2020 Apr 04, 2020

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Endnotes not linking in epub export. I see the same question has been unanswered in many threads. It used to work fine with InDesign CC 2017. Now, the latest version doesn't work. I spent hours creating 500 end notes in the print version. 

 

Is there any fix available to this? 

 

Thanks and Regards

Eswari

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Bug , EPUB

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correct answers 1 Correct answer

Contributor , Jan 11, 2021 Jan 11, 2021

Thank you. 

But, fortunately, I was able to figure out the issue. It's the text frames with baseline grid-enabled issue. Once I turn off the baseline grid, I was able to convert all endnotes to footnotes and successfully generated my epub.

 

Thanks and Regards

Eswari

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Community Expert ,
Apr 26, 2020 Apr 26, 2020

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I'm not familiar with the current Footnotes/Endnotes state of the art (and its bugs...)

I do know that in case of errors, and other mayhem, everyone turns to Peter Kahrel.

However, he retired. But his repository of scripts and documentation is still avaliable: 

https://indesignsecrets.com/peter-kahrels-script-repository-comes-to-creativepro.php

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Contributor ,
Jan 11, 2021 Jan 11, 2021

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Thank you. 

But, fortunately, I was able to figure out the issue. It's the text frames with baseline grid-enabled issue. Once I turn off the baseline grid, I was able to convert all endnotes to footnotes and successfully generated my epub.

 

Thanks and Regards

Eswari

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Community Expert ,
Jan 12, 2021 Jan 12, 2021

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What a coincidence !! A few weeks ago I helped processing a book into an interactive PDF and reflowable ePub. The PDF was easy (all table of content and endnotes links, back and forth) worked immediately. The ePub was a terrible feat ! The table of content worked (both the visual one and the structurally generated one), but the endnotes didn't. Well, not always, but as the work progressed, the file went corrupt.

 

We didn't have the time to investigate it thoroughly, but we did find out that from a certain point in the document or moment in time working on it, InDesign didn't create properly formatted hyperlinks anymore. The links to go to and return from an endnote didn't include the file name (it was just a numbered anchor). We eventually and manually corrected them in the HTML (there were only around 80 of them), and didn't bother figuring out the exact reason or pattern for InDesign to behave that way.

 

Your findings might be helpful to discover the real bug behind it !

I'll try to reproduce your procedure and see what happens, soon.

 

Thank you for reporting back on this 🙂

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Contributor ,
Jan 12, 2021 Jan 12, 2021

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But, I answered to an very old post. But, still, it's the same issue only.

I see what you mean. Yes, Endnotes exported will leave just anchor titles with no links. But, i cannot do the linking for 500 footnotes. Almost all my recent books are having more than 200 footnotes/endnotes. Most of them are endnotes. Client having peculiar requests too. So, i had to find a short way to make this work without much longer hardwork.

 

Workaround for this is:

1. Convert endnotes to footnotes which exports just fine with InDesign.

2. Only issue you get, all the footnotes displayed at the end of each chapter. You can leave them as is if the client agrees, otherwise, You can open epub and copy the footnotes at the end of each chapter to the endnotes title code page. and change the current html footnote links to point to the final endnote file.

This way, you no need to manually link all the endnotes. Only trouble is to copy and paste and replace the link reference using find/replace.

That saves the day!

Hope it will help more people struggling with the same issue.

 

Thanks and Regards

Eswari

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Community Expert ,
Jan 12, 2021 Jan 12, 2021

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I'm not sure if this is what you are referring to but it sounds like the same thing. I encountered this issue with older versions of InDesign (which I think you may be using). The issue was that if you used a hyperlink in a footnote, the footnotes broke from that point forward. Check your documents and see if the point at which the footnotes stop working, there's a hyperlink. I had to fix this with a script that a colleague wrote for me which I would run on the exported file. I hope that helps!

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Contributor ,
Jan 12, 2021 Jan 12, 2021

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Thanks for your response.

There were two issues with endnotes I faced.

1. Endnotes not exporting in latest version InDesign. It was working with InDesign 2017 CC. Not sure how they stopped this functionality in the latest versions. 

Solution/Workaround:

- Convert endnotes to footnotes. And follow the above thread procedure to get working endnotes at the end.

2. Converting endnotes to footnotes was hanging while I was trying the above solution. I have hyperlinks in all my endnotes. But, they didn't break. After your message, I need to go back and check if they are breaking.

Solution/Workaround:

- InDesign hanging because I have enabled baseline grid which inturns pushing all the footnotes and getting overset text and the InDesign crashes. So, I have removed the baseline grid and tried to convert again. It worked like a charm.

 

Thanks and Regards

Eswari

 

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Contributor ,
Jan 12, 2021 Jan 12, 2021

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Just to add to the above, when we say Indesign crashes, there were lot of issues it crashes. Like, grep styles. overset text and many more. The easy way to figure out the cause is to try doing in sets of conversion. Like, first 10, 20, 30 till we reach the issue point and then, we can see the root cause.

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Community Expert ,
Jan 12, 2021 Jan 12, 2021

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Sounds like the problem which was occurring in my document.

Most of the endnotes contained indeed web URLs (turned into hyperlinks).

We quickly used Find/Replace in Sigil to correct all references to the endnote with the full file name part, and the references back to the text were done manually – a lousy job, but with some music and a mug of strong black tea, it went quite quickly after all...

 

This long-standing bug is "under investigation" by the Adobe developers team, but this might take a few more days or years to get prioritised and solved.

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Community Expert ,
Jan 12, 2021 Jan 12, 2021

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Oh yeah, thank you again Eshu ! That was exactly what was happening: adding insult to injury, InDesign also crashes when you try to export the whole thing ! So I created a separate batch of html consisting of all text articles including (incomplete) endnote references, plus one empty final article (with its intended name), to let the proper manifest for the ePub be created. Next, I created a separate ePub of just the unlinked endnotes article, to replace the (empty) placeholder of the full ePub. And then we completed and corrected all links to and from the endnotes. 

 

Some knowledge of html and a tool like Sigil has become neccessary to get an ePub out of InDesign... 😞

 

Next time, I'll definitely try to notice if overset text is a culprit in combination with footnotes/endnotes, crashing InDesign upon exporting, and I'll also try see if hyperlinks in endnotes create an extra problem (incomplete links). It's a shame we have to do the testing and diagnosing.

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Contributor ,
Jan 12, 2021 Jan 12, 2021

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Thanks, Peter. I tried to resolve it only when I did not find any answer and it is really hard to manually create a whole list of endnotes again. Hopefully, InDesign reintroduces the endnotes functioning and save us all the trouble.

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New Here ,
Aug 10, 2021 Aug 10, 2021

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Another factor for me was teh presence of Paragraph Style Mappings in the InDesign Style. 

If there were NO export mappings at all in any Paragraph Styles, then the endnotes linked with no issues at all.

But if I add JUST a single mapping to ANY style, that broke the End-Note links.

Take that mappy away and the problem is solved. 

 

PLEASE ADOBE, this should not be that difficult to fix. 

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New Here ,
Aug 10, 2021 Aug 10, 2021

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Correction to the previous posting.  The reporting was premature and incorrect, but I cannot see how to delete a posting.

To be more accurate. It was not the presence of a mapping that couse the problem. Rather it was a mapping that included Split-Document (Epub) that caused the problem.

So this is consistent with the other reporting here. 

 

Apologies for the earlier mistaken conclusions. If the moderators could remove the previous post, that would be great. 

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New Here ,
Jun 05, 2022 Jun 05, 2022

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Hi Eswari,

 

Thank you for posting this as I stumble the same problem. I removed the baseline and still it won't export as long as my endnotes are still linking on InDesign. I figure out that I have to work around with your suggestions to convert the endnotes to footnotes. But the client don't want to have footnotes at the end of each chapter. So, how do I edit the epub file and cut the footnotes to the end of the book? Thanks.

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Contributor ,
Jun 09, 2022 Jun 09, 2022

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LATEST

This is a bit manual work that you need to do with the epub. You need to copy and paste the footnotes from the end of each chapter and keep it in the end notes xhtml/html file. At the same time, you need to update the referencces html file in the chapter footnote references as still they will point to the same html, where the footnotes were before. Then, make sure to click and check the references pointing correctly. Hope this helps you.

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Community Beginner ,
Feb 27, 2022 Feb 27, 2022

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The last post of Oston5EB3 makes sense.

 

Notes in exported PDF and ePub are buggy.   The problem is that when you click a note in the exported file, nothing happens.

Here is what I found so far.

 

EPUB

1. Export with endnotes and "Split EPUB" checked for some styles -> links to notes broken

2. Convert endnotes to footnotes -> notes work as pop-ups, as expected, (but need to re-convert every time when you export PDF)

3. Keep endnotes and remove "Split EPUB" from all styles -> notes work as endnotes, even if you want them as pop-ups. 

 

PDF

1. Exported PDFs generally work, except if your endnote style has Adobe World-Ready Paragaph Composer enabled.  In this case links back from endnotes are broken.

2. Switch back to Adobe Paragraph Composer and links work back and forth

3. If you need World-Ready, create backlinks manually

 

 

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Community Expert ,
Mar 02, 2022 Mar 02, 2022

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There is rarely any reason to use Split EPUB, at least as an ID export.

 

Just about the only reason for multi-file EPUBs is for ease of creation and management when using the manual editors and EPUB creators, which doesn't apply for ID development. Dividing up the content (to multiple internal XHTML files) is largely pointless.

 

The one place where splitting a large EPUB can be useful is for online/web access. I believe some readers can download one content document at a time, speeding up access to any given section of a document. But that again is something of a niche use. (IMHO, if you're going to put a large document up for web access, use HTML, not EPUB.)

 


╟ Word & InDesign to Kindle & EPUB: a Guide to Pro Results (Amazon) ╢

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 03, 2022 Mar 03, 2022

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NitroPress, I am using Split EPUB for retaining some of the layout structure of a PDF in reflowable epubs.

 

The texts I edit have introductions, and I want the actual content to begin on a new page with the title of the translated text on top.  Especially I don't want situations where half of the title appear at the bottom of the page, glued to the end of the introduction.

 

Is there a better way to do this than with Split EPUB?

 

Thanks

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Community Expert ,
Mar 03, 2022 Mar 03, 2022

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What layout structure does splitting preserve? In my experience, the only thing it enables is a hard chapter split, which (functionally) does little more than force a new page start. And the split internal structure often causes a cascade of headaches for TOCs, footnotes and even successful export at all.

 

EPUB is entirely dependent on the reader, and they vary widely in how they handle things like top spacing and page splits. (Since reflowable EPUB, strictly speaking, doesn't have pages, all efforts to force a hard page start are hacks. More or less.) Using a flowing reader will obliterate such 'page restarts.'

 

If you're using Thorium Reader as your proofing standard — which is recommended by most — then you do have some imposed pagination to work with. The simplest method I have found for forcing a chapter break in reflowable EPUB is to put a paragraph with large bottom spacing just ahead of the break—

  1. Body para
  2. Body para
  3. Body para with large bottom spacing (500px, etc.)
  4. Chapter Heading.

 

A functional page break/new start will fall between 3 and 4. Yes, it's a bit tedious to apply and it's not guaranteed to produce a consistent result on EPUB readers. (It does, however, allow you to eliminate top spacing on the following heading, which can be nice for layout.) The bottom spacing will disappear on Thorium and most paginated readers—that is, if there's only a small space between the last para and the bottom of the screen, it won't try to lap to the next page or force the text up.

 


╟ Word & InDesign to Kindle & EPUB: a Guide to Pro Results (Amazon) ╢

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Community Beginner ,
Mar 03, 2022 Mar 03, 2022

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Thank you, NitroPress.  I understand that although Indesign allows split epub, it is not really supported, or does not really work.  The positive side of leaving out my hard page breaks is that I don't have to convert between footnotes and endnotes for every iteration of PDF and epub.

 

Why is Thorium Reader recommended for proofing?  I'd like to test with several readers with the largest market share, but I don't see Thorium Reader on any lists.

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Community Expert ,
Mar 03, 2022 Mar 03, 2022

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Thorium is as close to a standard implementation of EPUB3, with considered adaptations for the accumulated changes of the last ten years. If an EPUB views satisfactorily on Thorium, it will almost certainly view properly on most other viewers. (And, although it may sound circular and partisan, if a Thorium-okay file doesn't read properly on another reader... it's likely the reader's fault.)

 

The bottom line is that most EPUB readers are outdated, badly written or (worse, in some ways) implemented the way one basement developer thought it should be. It's okay to have new ideas, but as the browser wars showed, it's in no one's interest to get very far from a standardized interpretation. EPUB is still learning this and Thorium is at the forefront of that movement, with the focused intent of being standard/ized, not trying to change the game.

 

Split EPUB has no real function from the creation end. It's a feature that permits separate authoring and management of sections or chapters so they can be assembled into one doc at the end. Taking one ID doc and splitting it up is... fairly pointless.

 


╟ Word & InDesign to Kindle & EPUB: a Guide to Pro Results (Amazon) ╢

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Community Expert ,
Feb 28, 2022 Feb 28, 2022

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Roope Koski said: "1. Exported PDFs generally work, except if your endnote style has Adobe World-Ready Paragaph Composer enabled.  In this case links back from endnotes are broken."

 

The issue with Adobe World-Ready Paragaph Composer and endnotes linking seems to be known to the developers.

At InDesign UserVoice Adobe's Ravi Kiran (Senior Lead Quality Engineer, Adobe InDesign) said: "Thanks for reporting the issue of backlinking not working for Endnotes with WR Composers. We’re going to review this shortly." That was on February 10, 2021 in my bug report here:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/42062446-text-formattin...

 

FWIW: My report did not mention the Adobe World-Ready Paragaph Composer at all.

I had other issues with endnote formatting that prevented back and forth linking of endnotes. All my findings are listed in that bug report. Also see into the comments section of this report.

 

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

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