Re: [latinreq] Footnotes and columns

On Thu, 2013-12-19 at 12:09 +0100, AUDRAIN LUC wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've seen in France multicolumn footnotes on single column pages, for
> school books on public domain texts.

The practical reason for this is two-fold:

1. that in many books most footnotes are short, so you save a lot of
space by formatting them in two columns;

2. that if you have chosen a comfortable measure (line-length) for
readable text given the type size in the main book, footnotes with
smaller type will not be comfortable to read with lines of the same
length.

A compromise on (1) is to set short footnotes inline and long ones as
blocks, intermixing them, to balance efficient use of space with ease of
use of the final book.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Thursday, 19 December 2013 15:56:56 UTC