We just added a new feature in our Studio. It allows you to add citations in a book.
What is a Citation?
When you are using another source of information in your writing, you must cite it. In other words, you must specify where this comes from. This is quite common in the scientific and academic world.
So for example if an article refers to a particular issue which was raised in another book or journal, it usually specifies details of the referenced source right to the page, if that source is within a book or a journal.
We have a new challenge in reflowable ePUB3. Page number is not longer a reliable address as it depends on screen size, font size, and many other factors.
We have started a new approach to referencing within ePUB3. As a first deployment we have fully implemented it inside our Studio. At this stage, this is just for citations within a book and NOT external ones.
You can click and open Citations menu when you are editing a chapter:
a- Insert reference
This action will let you make a piece of text (such as a name), an image, a video, an equation/formula or an interactive element to become a citable item. We call this action insertion of a reference. So for example you can make images or tables in a book citable in other parts of the same book.
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b- Insert referrer
Now that you have made some images, names etc citable, you can go to other parts of your book and refer to them.
c- Insert list of references
Finally, you can add a chapter and then insert a complete list of your references. This could be similar to index of names, places. etc that you see in most books.
Once all is done, here is how it will look in an example book. As you see all different types of references are automatically named and numbered sequentially and therefore we need to pick better and more descriptive names so that they are meaningful when listed.