Re: [css3-gcpm] Complex Footnotes

On Fri, October 4, 2013 4:51 am, Cramer, Dave wrote:
...
> Some books (The Bible) have so many short footnotes that the footnotes
> themselves need to be displayed inline. Other books (Shakespeare) may have
> two separate streams of footnotes, requiring two footnote regions.  Prince

Scholarly Bibles may similarly have multiple streams of footnotes (or
footnotes and marginalia).  There is a Jewish tradition of commentary for
which I really don't have the right term that is effectively footnotes
upon footnotes upon footnotes.  Liam would be able to point you to a scan
of a sample page.

> has implemented inline footnotes, with float: prince-inline-footnote |
> prince-inline-column-footnote. That reminds me that there's also the
> question of whether the footnote region is confined to a single column, or
> spans all columns. Again,  Prince has float: prince-footnote |
> prince-column-footnote.

The current GCPM ED shows examples of single-column and all-column
footnote area styles [3].  It's not clear to me whether the default would
be to fill (not span) all the columns defined for the page.  It also
doesn't seem possible to use more columns than are defined for the page,
which you might want to do because the footnote font size is smaller
and/or because the many footnotes are generally short.  E.g., "Book
Typography, A Designer's Manual", page 209, shows an example of three
columns of footnotes at the bottom of a single-column page, for which it
states "If several short notes fall on the same page, they are better set
in columns".

The current GCPM ED discusses the possibility of filling pages at the end
of the document with so-far-unplaced footnotes [1], but it seems to me
that you wouldn't want footnotes to carry over a 'page-group: start'
boundary [2], so would potentially similarly fill pages with footnotes at
the end of a page-group.

Regards,


Tony Graham                                   tgraham@mentea.net
Consultant                                 http://www.mentea.net
Mentea       13 Kelly's Bay Beach, Skerries, Co. Dublin, Ireland

[1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-gcpm/#laying-out-footnotes
[2] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-gcpm/#page-groups-
[3] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-gcpm/#the-footnote-area

Received on Friday, 4 October 2013 08:44:58 UTC