Re: footnotes in Docbook and marginalia

[Ron Ross <ronross@xxxxxxxxx>]

    >> 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.

Thanks for your quick response, Norm. I'll download and install the
newer version later today.


| 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...

O.K., now the truth will come out. The marginalia in my documents do
not appear in a presentable fashion. But the purpose of my comment
element is to provide *me* with pointers in the printout of a rough
draft. Particularly, I could not get marginalia to work unless I also
made the element a paragraph, and this invariably breaks the paragraph
in which it appears. Fine, this gives me extra white space to make
corrections;-). It suddenly strikes me now that I could probably
forego the marginalia part, just making it the nested paragraph that
it is and get the same result.

Here it is:

 ;true (#t) if given as variable (-V) parameter to jade
(define c-marg #f)

(element C
  (if c-marg
	    (make marginalia
	marginalia-sep: 12pt
	marginalia-side: 'end
	(make paragraph
	  font-size: 8pt
	  line-spacing: 8pt
	  font-posture: 'italic
	  start-indent: 6.1in
	  end-indent: -1in
	  quadding: 'start
	  hanging-punct?: #t))
		(empty-sosofo)))

The result is a little strange, but I am relatively happy with it. It
occurred to me that another way to get what I want would be to build
tables or columns; but aside from the complexity of trying to get
comments to match up with their lines of origin, the idea of
disturbing the entire layout of a simple document didn't appeal to me.

If you know of a better way.... But as your post suggests, you've
probably tried, and the limitation probably comes from the RTF
backend. In fact, Word Perfect (7 and 8) cannot display even this
"marginalia": the paragraphs are broken and comments appear flush
left. Wordpad is useless. So I rely on Microsoft's Word Viewer.

Ron

-- 
Traductions Ron Ross Translations
http://www.colba.net/~ronross
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