DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: How to get Marginalia ?

[Ekbert Mertens <ekbert dot mertens at ixos dot de>]

Meanwhile I got some more experience (well: try and error ;-) ). 

For those who are interested: Marginalia are not so difficult, at least with
jade's RTF front-end - you even don't need tricks (as for other things, e.g.
text wrapping-around graphics ;-) )

I added a "sidehead" tag to the DTD with a "title" and a "para" sub-tag. The
Stylesheet then generates a borderless table with two columns, where the
left column width is the standard %body-start-indent%, and the right column
width is %bodywidth%. Then you generate two paragraphs with corresponding
properties, process both title and para contents - and that's it. It looks
quite good.

Note: It did *not* work with positioned objects, which I tried at first
(coming from wrapping around graphics). The problem is, that jade usually
specifies space between paragraphs only by RTF's "\sb" (space-before)
property, where it adds the preceding space-after and the current
space-before. It works anywhere on the pages, but not with the first
paragraph on a page, as Word ignores the space-before of this paragraph
(which is ok), but does not ignore the space-before of the positioned frame.
Thus the sidehead is not at the same vertical position as the paragraph.

If you like to get more details, find my address below. I did not yet try it
at HTML, but it should work as well (but I'm not sure, whether it makes
sense here  due to space restrictions)

Kind regards
Ekbert Mertens

PS to Norman Walsh: As sideheads/marginalia are a very useful and common
feature, I propose to add them to DocBook, now that it works.

_______________________________________________ 
Ekbert Mertens
Product Information Group 
IXOS SOFTWARE AG 
Bretonischer Ring 12, D-85630 Grasbrunn 
Tel: +49.(0)89.4629.1508, Fax: +49.(0)89.4629.33.1508
http://www.ixos.com/de 
Mailto:Ekbert.Mertens@munich.ixos.de
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