As an f y i, ContentExpress provides something a little like this "out of the box". Here's an example :
(Article Title)
(Article Text)
[First] [Previous] [Back to Main Article] [Next] [Last]
What this gives you is the ability to jump to the first or last page. The next, previous or "up a level" options are not really as useful.
The bad news is that when this option is enabled, it also enables all sorts of additional behaviour to do with hierarchical contents. The next version of the package is moving away from this foolishness thank goodness, but the delivery timescales on that keep slipping so I don't know when it'll be available. I'm not prepared to implement the current beta.
Neku - as for your specific suggestion, my push back on that is that when I break an article into multiple sections for readability and quicker loading, I don't think that jumping from page 2 to an unspecified sub-topic on page 5 is all that helpful.
What I have seen, and I think is more useful, is a list of the page contents for each page in the article at the base of every page and the opportunity to jump to any page from that list. Check out this (rather extreme)
example.
Now you've got me going on the subject of layout, what's bothering me is the amount of white space I'm having to leave around in order to place text and the appropriate illustrations together. Page 2 of the CCR article is a classic example.
I have a number of options here:
- Use thumbnails and pop-ups (fettled by a bit of javascript)
- Again using js, bring up related images on a click (Example - the picture of the thermocouple electronics that M built, and the associated circuit diagram - I could do a "click here" (or "click on the picture") to see the circuit diagram)
- Stop worrying about it and leave it as it is
- Stop worrying about it and let the pictures go where they will, as long as the text flows nicely around them (in this case I think I need captions though)
- Some combination of all of this stuff
Views on the suggestions please.