footnotes in Docbook and marginalia

[Ron Ross <ronross@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I am completely new to this list, and only a little less new to DSSSL
itself, so ... without further apology I'll proceed to embarrass
myself.

I am working with NT Emacs 20.3.1, Psgml 1.1.6, jade 1.2.1 (sp 1.3.3),
on Win95.

First question: I cannot get footnotes to appear, using Docbook 3 and
Norman Walsh's Docbook stylesheet (I don't know the version number,
but is copyrighted 1998 - downloaded last October). This is using the
RTF backend through Jade. Is there a limitation in RTF, in Jade, or in
the stylesheet?

Of course, it could be my own ineptness, but I seem to have followed
the guidance given in the Docbook reference from Davenport. Whether I
use a combination of <footnoteref> and <footnote> or just the
<footnote> element, the footenote mark appears in the text but the
contents of the footnote appear nowhere in the document. I tested the
small one-paragraph example given in the reference documentation,
which produced the same result:

<PARA>
Citation is a reference to some published work by means
of a reference string, such as <CITATION>Rohmer, 1919</CITATION>;
if you want to refer to a published work by means
of its title, use CiteTitle, as for 
<CITETITLE PUBWORK="book">Tales of Secret Egypt</CITETITLE>
by Sax Rohmer, a book 
full of local color.<FOOTNOTEREF LINKEND="foo123" LABEL="dagger">
<FOOTNOTE ID="foo123">
<PARA>Published at the height of the Egyptology craze.</PARA>
</FOOTNOTE>
</PARA>

the result (copied from MSWord Viewer):

   Citation is a reference to some published work by means of a
   reference string, such as [Rohmer, 1919]; if you want to refer to a
   published work by means of its title, use CiteTitle, as for Tales
   of Secret Egypt by Sax Rohmer, a book full of local color.0 0

The footnote does not appear. Also, you will notice the two marks
(0's) instead of one (and they're not daggers, but that's a minor
point).

The only mention I could find in Norman Walsh's DocBook stylesheet was
to %footnote-ulinks%, which I am not sure applies (and am not sure how
to use).

Finally, giving up on a proper footnote, I thought I'd cheat by
putting in a FootnoteRef element (to get the mark) and referring it to
a FormalPara at the end of the document containing what was supposed
to be the footnote contents and giving the mark (a number) as the
contents of the FormalPara Title. The result of this was that the
contents of the Formalparagraph were inserted into the text where I
placed the footnoteref and also appeared where I had placed that
paragraph. A non-starter I guess.

Second question: 

After much hacking of my own DTD and corresponding DSSSL stylesheet, I
have programmed a comment-like element whose appearance in the output
I can toggle on and off. When it is "on" it appears in small type as
marginalia, when "off" it's an '(empty-sosofo)' and disappears from
the output.

Looking to take advantage of the DocBook stylesheet's many
light-years' advance over mine, I converted my document instance from
my own DTD to DocBook. Apart from the footnote issue, I would also
like to find an element and stylesheet specification that would be
analogous to the element just described. DocBook has a Comment
element, but used as-is it doesn't do what I want (it simply does not
appear in the output). Is there a way to get what I want from Docbook?

Thanks very much in advance,

Ron

-- 
Traductions Ron Ross Translations
http://www.colba.net/~ronross
ronross@xxxxxxxxx
"They were magical delusions, fireworks." -I. Murdoch


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