Re: [css3-gcpm] Complex Footnotes

On Sun, October 6, 2013 1:57 pm, Håkon Wium Lie 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?

Yes.  In a three-column set-up, it would seem a better alternative to have
all three the same height rather than, Goldilocks-like, having one that's
very large and one that's very small and only one that's 'just right'.

>  > 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;
>   }}

That is what you'd reach for, yes.

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

Or by the Digital Publishing Interest Group's pagination task force (lead
by Dave Cramer) deciding that it's a priority requirement (though I
suspect there'd be higher priorities).

Regards,


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

[1] http://www.w3.org/2012/12/global-publisher/report.html

Received on Sunday, 6 October 2013 16:10:19 UTC