[Scribus] Thoughts on footnotes

[jon]

> 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 :-)
>
Hmmm ...
just another thought - floating objects?
It's not necessarely only footnotes but can be images, additional  
notes, etc.
I don't know if this possibly would infringe any adob* copyrights but  
they use
floating anchored objects within InDes*gn. Think it's not a really  
bad concept
wich in one way or another might be adopted?

For footnotes one might use a special text-formatting for the  
footnote numbers
in the text and let a script find out to which page it does belong  
and move the
belonging text or text boxes (with footnotes) to this page (static  
position relative page).
Sure, I don't and would never know how to.

But anchored relative or relatively anchored objects? (relative to  
text and/or page position)

Sounds like traditional *automated* layout for me. I do this a lot  
manually.

Jon