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