thad said:
>   Hi. I'm a college lit teacher and
>   have been thinking about doing footnotes and annotations
>   of the sort most editions for college students supply
>   for some PG classics, so my students could have the
>   usual kinds of help reading them, and print them out,
>   mark them up, bring them to class for discussion, etc.
>   (I think the lack of notes. not the quality of the texts
>   themselves, is currently the main barrier to
>   more widespread use of PG texts in classes.)
>   If I did this, I'd want to make the annotations available
>   free for anybody else who wanted to use them for teaching
>   (or just to read). Some form of structured markup that
>   allowed people to reformat and print to different sizes
>   and devices in the future would be nice, rather than pdfs...

this is an entirely reasonable course of action.

what you need is a viewer-program that can
incorporate freestanding annotations into the
presentation of the text (which remains static).

i have written such a viewer-program, but have
not yet programmed the annotation capabilities.

if you'd be able to outline the ones you would like,
and be willing to test them once i programmed 'em,
i'd be happy to proceed that way...

we usually think of "annotations" as textual, but
they can actually manifest in a variety of ways,
such as margin highlights, graphics, movies, etc.
(see tk3 at nightkitchen.com for a program that
is adept at allowing multiple types of annotations.)

making your annotations widely and freely available,
such as putting them on your website for download,
is a generous thing to do...

-bowerbird