[reportlab-users] rl, foot notes or margin notes

[Robin Becker]

Hi René,

On 24/04/2014 10:22, René Bastian wrote:

> Hello the RL-List,

>

> I cannot find in the docs if there is a mean to place foot notes

> or margin notes into a RL text.

>


At the moment I don't think there's any way to do this.


> Best regards,


I have thought of approaches involving diversions. There are two main issues 
assuming we keep to the existing story flows into a frame model.

1) How to indicate in the story / paragraph that a foot note or marginal is to 
be used. Personally I think it best to put the definition of the note into the 
text that it annotates, but perhaps there's a case for a specific note indicator 
story object. It's reasonable to suppose that things other than paragraphs might 
want to have foot notes eg table cells. Currently plain text cells don't allow 
for any kind of markup.

2) How to lay out the notes. This is more or less complicated by the notes 
needing to appear 'near' the referring object (I think it's almost always 
after). The problem is complicated by stylistic issues and coping with corner 
cases. Imagine the last just fitting paragraph on a page has a foot note. 
Presumably we need to defer the footnote to the next page. There's also the 
issue of the indicator to use ie a numeric superscript or special symbol and the 
limit on the size of footnotes on a given page. If we're doing multi-column 
pages should foot notes occupy the full page width or be conditioned by their 
column etc etc.

Ideas & criticism welcome.
-- 
Robin Becker