Hi Folks,
I'm very happy with how Footnotes have turned out. It would be
great to get End Note support in place too. Pat Lam has done a lot of work
to get End Notes mostly working correctly in the 1.0.x series. In his code
he made the text of End Notes be places in a seperate section at the end
of the document, like Headers/footers.
ie the fragment structure in the piecetable looked like this
<section><block><text>.......<section>...<endNote section><Hdr/Ftr Section>..
On the other hand footnotes are now placed within blocks.
<block><text>.. .<Footnote><block><field anchor><text>..
.<EndFootnote><text>..<block>
The advantage of the approach Pat used is that this maps nicely into our
regular column containers and we can resue a lot of hte hdr/ftr code
within the view. To me the downside of this approach is that it is
difficult to place EndNotes at the end of sections (like for example at
the end of chapters).
On the upside it would not be too hard to port this code over from 1.0.x
and get it working rather quickly in HEAD.
If on the other hand we bury EndNote text within blocks like footnotes we
can reuse a lot of the code for manipulating footnotes. This also maps
nicely into RTF so is easy to export/import.
On the downside we now have to decide whether we want a new column at the
end of every section to place EndNote containers or whther just to place
EndNote containers within columns. Also we have be care about deleting
references. It is quite common to have multiple references to the same end
note. Do we want to maintaina reference count on the endnote strux and
delete when it drops to zero? (we can do this via attribute/value pair).
We might also want to delete the original reference which would delete the
EndNote text unless we put in special purpose code in the piecetable..
Anyway I would appreciate comments suggestion especially Pat Lam on what
is the Right Thing to do.
Cheers
Martin
