Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Bordernotes

[Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com>]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 08:53:53AM +0100, Stephan Wiesner wrote:
> Hi list,
> Last week I asked whether anybody had done something like notes at the
> border of the text, but got not replies. Maybe I didn't express myself
> clearly enough? Anyway, here it is.
> I have attached an example PDF and the corresponding XML and XSLT.  
> I use a format of 
> <xsl:param name="page.width">240mm</xsl:param>
> <xsl:param name="page.height">190mm</xsl:param> 
> <xsl:param name="page.margin.outer">4cm</xsl:param>
> <xsl:param name="page.margin.inner">2cm</xsl:param>
> for my texts, so that I have a lot of space to use and currently the
> values for the bordernotes are hardcoded.
> 
> This might not work with all texts. I encountered "nulls" from FOP when
> I had very long paragraphs and a lot of footnotes. It seems that at a
> certain point FOP is no more able to calculate the wrapping of the text.

Very interesting.  I didn't get a chance to test it, but
I was going to suggest using fo:list-block, with a single
fo:list-item per paragraph.  The list-item contains two 
side-by-side blocks fo:list-item-label and
fo:list-item-body.  Although people tend to think of
list-item-label as containing a bullet, number, or short
string, in FO it can contain the whole paragraph, and the
list-item-body can contain the annotation block.

I'm not sure it would work in FOP, but it seems it might
have less overhead than tables, and perhaps be easier for
FOP to handle the longer paragraphs.

-- 

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
Technical Publications                      voice: (831) 427-7796
Caldera International, Inc.                 fax:   (831) 429-1887
                                            email: bobs@caldera.com