joshua said:
Both methods lose a little fidelity, since the Sidenote is not printed exactly right by the text it refers to, like it would in the original. But method two keeps it fairly close, and context should allow the reader to easily tell the part of the paragraph it refers to. Method one would allow the marker to appear near its original source location, but the information is now not in the same eye region. The user must click to the notes section to see the information, which is commonly meant to be more accessible/more important than a typical footnote.
is it unreasonable to want to view _all_ notes -- sidenotes, footnotes, _and_ endnotes _too_ -- right there close to the context where they apply? i think not. in print form, it cannot be done, of course. (not by the printer, anyway, although readers can do a pretty good job of using their hands to hold both pages, and switch between them.) hotlinks between a note and its referent can enable a person to "switch" in a similar way. but you're still looking at either one page or the other, when you want to look at _both_. and in the electronic arena, we can easily go that step better, so why not take advantage? in my viewer-program, all notes are stored in an end-note section, but any note can be "popped up" by a user just by clicking on its note-indicator. so on the left half of the screen, they have the body of the text, and on the right-half they have the end-note section in a scrollable edit-field. (actually the whole file, but it's auto-positioned at the appropriate note in the end-note section.) this lets them see each note in the context of the notes that surround it -- which can be very useful when the author has used ibids and op cits. in addition, if the user double-clicks inside the scrolling-field on the number of _another_ note, the display on the left-hand side jumps to show the page that has the text that calls _that_ note. so even though the notes are collected together in a place that is removed from their referents in the _file_, the viewer-program brings them together in a way giving users maximum power, letting them see text and note at the same time, and navigate easily amongst all of the notes. as i experiment with this system, i'm quite happy i've achieved a very good solution to the problem, and i consider myself to be "done" working on it... (at least until i consider what to do when printing.) but if you can think of any other capability i should add to it, please suggest it, i would love to hear it! and let the programmers of _your_ favorite viewer -- whoever they are -- know that _you_ would enjoy this ability to view _all_ notes just like sidenotes, simultaneously with the text that references them, so you would appreciate it if they would program that. let those programmers know that you'll be willing to format notes however they require in order to provide this feature, but you definitely _want_ the capability. and if you're not on speaking terms with the people who are programming your viewer-tools, _why_not_? -bowerbird