How deal with marginal notes (XSL-FO) ? « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

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How deal with marginal notes (XSL-FO) ?

(8 posts) (3 voices)

Asked 5 years ago by laurannebp@gmail.com
Latest answer from laurannebp@gmail.com

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laurannebp@gmail.com
Member
Dear all,

I am currently working on transforming a text in XML-TEI to FO. This is a text of the fifteenth century and it contains marginal notes. I have no idea how to manage these notes in my stylesheet.
I use oXygen for my transformation (and FOP, indeed).

Does anyone know how to solve the problem ?

Thank you very much.

Best regards,

--
Lauranne Bertrand
IE Informatique pour les Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes
Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance (CESR)
59 rue Néricault-Destouches
BP 11328
37013 Tours Cedex France
http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/
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Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Dorothea Salo
Member
It took a while for XSL:FO to admit that marginalia existed. :) That said, if you're using an engine that is 1.1-compliant, there seems to be a way to make it happen using
```
fo:float
```
tricks.

See this page, scrolling down to "Creating marginalia using side floats."
Posted 5 years ago Permalink
laurannebp@gmail.com
Member

Thank your for your answer. I tried this solution two days ago and it failed. Seems that fo:float doesn't work with FOP (maybe it's a 1.0 engine in oXygen).

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Conal Tuohy
Member

Replying to @laurannebp@gmail.com's post:

You might try laying out the document in a table. I've used tables before for this kind of thing, with FOP, and it can work, although it's rather inelegant. People used to use tables for layout in HTML before we had CSS - it's the same idea.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
laurannebp@gmail.com
Member

Replying to @conal.tuohy@gmail.com's post:

It's not an option because the TEI encoding respects the original text structure and logical form. In fact, the transformation is working with AHFormatter but it's not an open source engine. Maybe I will try LaTeX.

Thank you.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Dorothea Salo
Member

Dang, sorry, you're right; FOP still hasn't implemented floats. I believe XEP has, if you can afford it.

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
Conal Tuohy
Member

Replying to @laurannebp@gmail.com's post:

Lauranne, I didn't mean to imply that your TEI document would be laid out in a table; rather that you would transform each TEI block element into a cell in a table, and put the marginalia also in the same table row. It's ugly, but it can work (with FOP)

Posted 5 years ago Permalink
laurannebp@gmail.com
Member

Replying to @conal.tuohy@gmail.com's post:

Hi Conal,

I see what you mean but it's a little complicated with an XSL transformation. My notes float in a specific position, but with a table and two columns it's really difficult. Plus, my blocks are divisions or paragraphs, so they take in several pages. Transform p or div into table doesn't give the right result. What would be nice : one table in each page, but I can't target the page content (there isn't an enclosing element) or only with a regular expression and a xsl:function (ouch !)
My TEI looks like :

<div>
<p>
some text
<pb/>
some text</p>
<p>some text</p>
<p>some text<note place="margin-right">marginalia</note>
<pb/>
.........
.........</p>
</div>

Posted 5 years ago Permalink

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