[Scribus] Thoughts on footnotes

[Gregory Pittman]

Ralf-Diether Ebel wrote:
> I think it can work. Imaginge a footnote-frame, which will be only 
> "active" if a footnote appears on the page where it is placed. "Active" 
> means it's like a picture-frame, where text flows around. If it's 
> filled, the text from the text-frame above will be automatically 
> shrinked,because of the (already implemented) "flow around" mechanism.
> If you then have the possibility to adopt the height of the textframe to 
> the contents (I think it was already another requested feature for 
> "normal" text-frames), together with a "Zero-Position" of the text-box 
> at the lower left corner, than it might be a solution - for footnotes.
> But just my little ideas.
>   
It would be nice if it can be figured out how to make footnotes feasible
in the context of other operations in Scribus.

Perhaps what could work would be as a variation on tables (once this
gets straightened out).
For example, imagine footnote creation leading to a simple table, where
there is a number of rows but only a single column, with each cell
containing one footnote. Generated in this fashion, it could quite
automatically become an endnote.
For footnotes, there would also need to be some sort of slice-and-dice
mechanism, so that individual or groups of cells could be split off the
original endnote table, then placed on each page.

As an offshoot of this, one might also think of this kind of table
structure underneath functioning like tables in a database. In fact this
could lead to an import-export capability for Scribus to interact with
oocalc, Postgresql, and MySql (and there already are Python hooks in
these). So in a sense, footnotes merely represent a specialized database
table.

Greg