Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
Of of curiosity, what is your reason for wanting to flatten the structure of an ePub? I can't see any advantages to doing so.
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Because when adding to an omnibus edition with later-published pieces, if one doesn't flatten the epub one ends up with a bunch of overlapping filenames, inconsistent folder depth, duplicated elements* and random renaming, and so on. Which then gets even more fun when even later volumes get added, especially under another substantive-content editor (example:
The Cambridge History of Science was "complete" with six volumes and then added a seventh one that wasn't even contemplated until after the first four volumes had been published; closer to popular concerns, remember that George R.R. Martin's
A Song of Ice and Fire series was supposed to be complete in three books…).
I freely admit this is an uncommon preference. But I want it. I want the pony, too, even though I'm not one of the kewl kidz eager to throw away cross-medium structural integrity and labelling consistency because that would be kewl. (And no, you kidz don't get to object that this is meaningless until you've been the series editor for multivolume works released across a decade or more and had to resolve this for reprints/reissues yourself.
Get off my lawn!)
So my question stands. I want the option/ability, not a default...
* Admittedly, this is most often the publisher's fault. Very few publishers manage to design, let alone follow, a stylesheet established for "volume 1" several years later in "volume 6," even leaving aside "we've converted from stand-alone InDesign to the cloud version, changed our default house typeface, and brought in a new advertising director who wants all of the back-of-the-book ads to follow
her preferences" problems. It's especially annoying when there are tables that need to be compared across volumes, footnotes/endnotes, and other nonlinear-narrative elements. (That is, the stuff that HTML was supposed to make possible for scientists to exchange in the first place.)