How to use

When I started thinking about Notes & Sources for Devil in the Stack, I knew three things:
1. I don't love footnotes.
2. Sources alone could increase the size of the book by 20%.
3. Flipping between main text and Notes can be irritating.

The solution seemed obvious: put them online.* In my mind's eye I saw a reader with a handsome print book in one hand and a very dry martini in the other, with Notes & Sources open on a nearby phone or tablet or laptop, ready to be consulted while reading or maybe at the end of a chapter. Obviously, things seldom turn out as we imagined (©Jean Paul Sartre) so feel free to swap out the martini for a glass of wine—or even tea. The reading experience will be similar.

Here's how these Notes work. On desktop the top menu shows all the available pages: click to enter the desired chapter. Once on a chapter page, the menu on the left allows navigation by page number within that chapter, allowing readers to jump to any zone of interest. Scroll or jump back up and the top menu reappears. For mobile this functionality is all handled within the navigation hamburger at the top left of the screeen: to jump to a particular page from within a chapter, simply touch the hamburger, then the blue submenu icon for that chapter to get a list of pages there are entries for. Select the one you want.

The line of text a note refers to is highlighted blue. Live links are in blue text but turn gold when moused over or tapped. The search box is global, returning results for all the chapters, clearly delineated, including the one you're in. Next to the search box is a sun icon for toggling between light and dark themes, to taste.

New features will be added as I figure them out. The next big innovation (as mentioned on the About page) will be to have the book's code, including for the Shakespearian Insult Engine, runnable using PyScript. A mail address for reporting issues appears on the "About these notes" page and a link to the main andrewsmithauthor.com website is at the end of the top menu.

* If only the execution had also been so obvious...