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• • April 13, 2020 at 1:26 pm #1238003
    Curt Bianchi

    Member

    I see from the archives that this is a topic that has come up in the past. In my case, I have a non-fiction book in InDesign that I started indexing yesterday. After a while, I tried exporting it to a reflowable ePub. I got this error:

    Page Anchor not found : 71
    Page Anchor in “Book copy.indd” is missing: 71

    Delightful! Using the story editor I was able to batch delete all of the index entries from each of the stories one story at a time. That eliminated the page anchor error, so it’s definitely associated with the index. I haven’t been able to determine that the problem is associated with one particular index entry. I have tried deleting them from the first story to the last, one story at a time, as well as from the last story to the first. Either way I continue to get errors until I have eliminated them all. This is worse than identifying one particular errant index entry.

    By the way, doing Replace/Find Next in the story editor when replacing index entries with no text causes InDesign to crash, but doing a replace-all works.

    Does anyone know if this error is consequential in terms of preventing the resulting ePub from being validated? I’ll be investigating this myself, but if anyone has any tips, let me know! I can’t be the only one with this problem. :-)

    Thank,
    Curt

  • April 13, 2020 at 8:20 pm #1238134
    Briar Whitehead

    Participant

    Hi Curt. I commiserate. I had an identical error recently. I also worked out it was related to the index. I was working on a clean file – meaning I had had the same error in an earlier edition of the same book (in an earlier version of Indesign) and had decided to start completely afresh with the new edition to eliminate any possible artefacts. But it came up again in the pristine edition and I could not track it down. I finally left the thing there because I found that when I created the reflowable epub and tested the index on a number of different epub readers everything that mattered seemed to be working OK. I also got the number 71, and knowing that you got the same error lets me know it wasn’t anything to with Page 71. Something might not have been working optimally but not that I could find. I actually didn’t do the validation step (which I realise is not recommended. This is partly because I had already taken the book from epub to the latest version of Kindle previewer (the desktop version) to make sure Kindle processes could handle it. It had no problem with the conversion from epub to mobi. This was a complex book with about 50 diagrams images, footnotes, TOC (internal and navigational). I did find another problem related to the index (which may or may not be associated with this page anchor messsage). I found that where I had entries spanning a number of pages only the first ( or was it the last) page entry was live. I found a post purporting to fix this issue (more or less) but it was a complex fix and I left it alone. From memory it only happened with reflowable epubs. Briar

  • April 13, 2020 at 11:53 pm #1238174
    Curt Bianchi

    Member

    Thanks for the feedback, Brian. So I spent a good part of the day investigating this. I created a document with just one of my chapters and then added about 50 index entries. When exporting to ePub, I got another “page anchor not found” error. I whittled down the number of index entries to less than ten and still got the error. However, the number of the anchor in error changed as I did that. Once I was down to six index entries (and still getting the error), I cracked open the ePub and looked at the files. No problems with the index entries. The links in the index itself were all there, and the anchors in the chapter were also all there. So the index is good, and the chapter is good. I’m coming around to the same conclusion as you, that although InDesign throws this error, it does not indicate a bad ePub.

    My book is also pretty complex and large, with about 1,500 endnotes and I expect a similar number of index entries when I’m all done. It is maddening that the endnote links are missing the destination file when exporting an ePub with the spilt document option, but I can fix that at the end of the process. I am also aware of the problem with index entries spanning multiple pages, and I can fix that, too. My big concern is wasting time constructing the index in InDesign, only to find out it is corrupted. I guess at this point I’m reasonably confident that that is not the case, so I will keep going.

  • April 14, 2020 at 4:01 pm #1238414
    Briar Whitehead

    Participant

    I’ll be interested to know what your fix is for the problem with the non-live link in an index entry when several pages are involved.

    Not sure what the missing endnote links are about. I also used the Split doc option but had no issues. I was converting footnotes to endnotes though and not creating endnotes from scratch.

    My testing of the index was not rigorous. But I was satisfied that it was OK enough to work for readers. The epub was going on a website for international download, and there were pdf and kindle options there too.

  • April 15, 2020 at 9:51 am #1238434
    Curt Bianchi

    Member

    Hi Brian

    I believe the problem with the non-live link in an index entry is because the second page of a multi-page index entry has an empty href:

    <p class=”Index-Level-1″>avant-garde jazz, 41–42</p>

    The second href is empty. These could be fixed manually after exporting from InDesign with search and replace so that the second page number is no longer be a link. I.e.:

    <p class=”Index-Level-1″>avant-garde jazz, 41–42</p>

    The problem with endnotes in a multi-file document is that, unlike index entries, the links of endnotes (in both directions) do not include the file name. So in the multi-file case, the links do not work. That is, InDesign exports endnotes like this:

    <p><span id=”endnote-001″>1Personal interview, Sep. 15, 2003.</p>

    When you really need this:

    <p><span id=”endnote-001″>1Personal interview, Sep. 15, 2003.</p>

    In addition, the links in the body text files to the index would also need to name the file containing the index entries themselves. This is also broken in multi-file ePubs exported by InDesign.

    The missing file name prevents the links from working in a ePub reader, and also throws errors in ePub validators. I have not submitted my files to Amazon or anywhere else, so I’m not sure whether these would be accepted as is. The endnotes can be fixed with search and replace after exporting from InDesign. Obviously, it is less than optimal to have to edit the ePub files after exporting from InDesign, and it would be very helpful of Adobe fixed these problems.

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