Re: footnotes in Docbook and marginalia

[Norman Walsh <ndw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

| 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?

That's an _old_ version. Newer versions support footnotes, but
only as endnotes. Bottom-of-the-page footnotes aren't supported
by the RTF backend.

| 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.

Yeah, footnoteref should only point to a footnote element, though I
can't explain the behavior you saw.

| 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.

Are you willing to post the DSSSL that does that, I can't think of any
easy way to make marginalia in the RTF backend...

| 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?

Marginalia aren't supported, but you could easily make comments appear
as marginalia, if you were so inclined.

Start by getting a more recent version of the stylesheets from
http://nwalsh.com/docbook/dsssl/ and let me know if you continue to
have problems.

                                        Cheers,
                                          norm
-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@xxxxxxxxxx>      | Some people can tell what time it
http://nwalsh.com/                 | is by looking at the sun, but I've
                                   | never been able to make out the
                                   | numbers


 DSSSList info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist