Re: [css3-gcpm] Complex Footnotes

Tony Graham wrote:

 > 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.  

With 'fill', you mean that there should be three (say) column at the
(say) bottom of the page, and that all footnotes are pured into those
columns? 

 > 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".

In principle, one should be able to make the footnote area a multicol
container. Like this:

  @page { @footnote {
    float: bottom;
    column-span: all;
    columns: 3;
  }}

Whether implementor are happy with this, I don't know. I suspect they
would need convincing by customers, not just spec editors :)

 > 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.

I agree, the page group seems like a  natural border.

 > [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

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Sunday, 6 October 2013 12:58:13 UTC