Re: End Notes.

From: Martin Sevior (msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Jan 21 2003 - 19:17:01 EST

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    On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Tomas Frydrych wrote:

    >
    > Hi Martin,
    >
    > I would probably prefer if the endnotes and footnotes share as much
    > code as possible for the sake of future maintanance.
    >

    I would too but I'd very much like to get Pat Lam's opinion before
    launching into this. He might even want to do the work :-)

    > > 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..
    >
    > The way multiple references are handled in Word is by using
    > NOTEREF field: you bookmark the primary reference, and then
    > when you want to refer to the same note again, you insert a field
    > {NOTEREF "my_bookmark"}. This works for both footnotes and
    > endnotes, and together with the PAGEREF field in case of footnotes
    > it is rather powerful. The bigest downside is that if you delete the
    > note or the reference bookmark, all the other references turn into
    > message "Error: bookmark not defined!"; tracking and fixing it
    > through a 250 page manuscript is a minor nightmare.
    >

    He He. I was just think of a rather easy solution to this for us. (Just
    scan the doc for fields with identical footnote-id's and delete them
    inside a undo GLOB). It appears MS just bails out :-)

    > It would be invaluable if we could devise of mechanism that would
    > allow to insert multiple references to both endnotes and footnotes,
    > and warn you if you try to delete a primary reference which has
    > secondary references attached to it.
    >

    We could use the refcounting attribute idea to warn or just remove them
    upon deleting the footnote/endnote anchor.
     
    > If we go down this road, the format of the secondary references
    > should be customisable so that the reference could appear either as
    > the note number or the number of the page on which the primary
    > reference is, so that you could easily create things likel 'see note {3}
    > on page {1}'.
    >

    Yep. We could do this fancy stuff quite easily. Just a new type of type
    of field with two parameters. The footnote-id and the type of reference
    required. These would just be two attributes. The automatically
    updating feilds framework we put together would simply look up the
    footnote via it's footnote-id attribute and decide what value to give it
    via a new attribute (say footnote-type with values
    "pos_in_doc","page_number", "pos_on_page" etc...)

    Cheers

    Martin



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