Re: DOCBOOK: Marginalia

["Vladimir G. Ivanovic" <vladimir at acm dot org>]

Just in case it wasn't known, LaTeX does marginalia. They're called
marginal notes (\marginpar). The discussion on pp. 59-60 of
Lamport's "LaTeX: Users's Guide and Reference Manual, 2/e" mentions that
they are not handled efficiently by LaTeX.

LaTeX moves a marginal note down so it doesn't bump into a previous one
and issues a warning. Also marginal notes always stay on one page. They
will overflow past the bottom of the page.

It seems to me that marginal notes are an example of where it's hard to
separate logical structure from presentation.

--- Vladimir

--------
Vladimir G. Ivanovic                        http://leonora.org/~vladimir
2770 Cowper St.                                         vladimir@acm.org
Palo Alto, CA 94306-2447                                 +1 650 678 8014

"PG" == Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com> writes:

  PG> At 09:09 2002 06 26 -0400, Jason Foster wrote:
  >> <snip/>
  >> 
  >> Would a marginalia be considered an annotation?

  PG> Since "annotation" is a logical concept and "marginalia"
  PG> is (at least as used here) a presentation, it is certainly 
  PG> the case that one could want to present an annotation as 
  PG> a marginalia [a marginalium?], but...

  >> In textbooks a (somewhat) common layout is to divide the page into two columns (65%,35%?) where the inside columns contain the full text and the outside columns contain a paragraph-by-paragraph summary.  A while back Norm described this as marginalia, and I would be tickled pink if it became a part of DocBook (and the FO stylesheets!)
  >> 
  >> Jason Foster

  PG> ...defining precisely how marginalia should be formatted
  PG> and being able to support them in composition systems is
  PG> very difficult.*

  PG> In particular, neither XSL 1.0 nor CSS supports marginalia.
  PG> Hence I did not consider the possibility of marginalia when
  PG> I outlined the processing expectation issues of the proposed
  PG> annotation element.  But thanks for bringing it up, at least
  PG> as an issue.

  PG> paul

  PG> * Marginalia are floating constucts which are already tricky,
  PG>   but they are further complicated by the fact that their
  PG>   composed locations are supposed to be vertically aligned
  PG>   with their anchor in the flowing text.  Not only is this
  PG>   hard to do at best, but it's not even easy to define.  For
  PG>   example:  what is the proper alignment when you have two
  PG>   marginalia on the same word?; what do you do when marginalia
  PG>   anchored near the bottom of the page won't all fit on that
  PG>   page?; what happens when the anchors for two marginalia are
  PG>   closer together than the height of the first marginalia?, etc.