[xep-support] margin notes

[Nikolai Grigoriev]

Els,

> I've searched the archives for information on formatting margin notes, but
> found nothing useful. I'm not interested in the discussion on whether or not
> margin notes should be supported; we have a formatting need for them and
> wonder what is the best way to format them with XSLFO?

The best and the only correct XSL FO mechanism for marginal notes
are side floats. They are not supported in the current version of XEP,
sorry.

> In one case, the 'margin notes' are keywords derived from the text in the
> corresponding paragraph; the margin notes should be placed in the outer
> margin, which is alternatively on the left-hand and right-hand side
> respectively.

Note that even with XSL-FO side floats, there will be problems about it:
floating direction can only be 'left'/'start' or 'right'/'end', but not 'inside'
or 'outside' as needed in your case. CSS legacy is hard to die...

> In another case, the 'margin notes' are not really notes, but act as a kind
> of revision bar by indicating changes in the margin that correspond to the
> revised text in the paragraph. These notes (asterisks) need to be placed in
> the margin exactly on the same horizontal level as the corresponding main
> paragraph.
> What is the best way to format these notes? E.g. by using a table construct
> (which is rather elaborate, and will offer a problem when the notes are
> alternatively on the left-hand and on the right-hand side),

The latter case could be formatted through an abusive trick of overlapped
list-item-body/list-item-label - if only we have text-align="inside | outside".
Unfortunately, there is no easy workaround in this case, too.

> Suggestions are welcome!

It's hard to suggest :-(. Something (at least your latter case) can be achieved
by manipulating the intermediate XML representation level; but this is tricky
and leverages XEP-specific interfaces, thus posing problems of non-portability.

Regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev
RenderX

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