[Scribus] Thoughts on footnotes

[Thomas Zastrow]

Dear all,

I'm not able to read french, but I want also to give my 2 cents on 
footnotes. Please don't misunderstand me, I don't want to push the 
developers in a special  direction, but when we have math formulas from 
the GSOC project, there are just  footnotes missing and I'll write my 
dissertation in Scribus ;-)

So, this are just some thoughts I had:

Footnotes are a floating element. In contrast to (Scribus-) Frames with 
*absolute* positions, their positions are *relative*. In fact, there is 
just one rule for footnote's positions: they have to appear on the same 
page as the text where they were introduced.

With Scribus' frame system, it is in my oppinion not possible to realize 
traditional footnotes because the frames positions are absolute. But 
Scribus also has a floating element: the text itself in frames. Think of 
how chained text frames are working: depending on the necessities, the 
text flows from frame to frame.

Perhaps this can be used for implementing footnotes in Scribus not the 
traditional way, bounded to the page, as it is done in LateX, XSL FO & 
co. Doing it the Scribus way, footnotes can be bound to the frame and 
not the page. To illustrate this, I build a small example:

http://www.thomas-zastrow.de/temp/ScribusFootnotes.pdf

Doing it this way, it would be necessary to split the available space in 
frames into two parts: one for the text at the top and one at the bottom 
for the footnotes. At first, the size of the footnote part has to be 
calculated and than the rest is for the text. If this results in another 
segmentation of the footnotes, the procedere of calculating the space 
has to start again.

Just 1.5 cents :-)

Best,

Tom

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