Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

From time to time the question of using sidenotes rather than footnotes in OpenOffice arises. In case it may be of use, the following URL points to a JavaScript implementation for Adobe Indesign; how this might transfer to OpenOffice I cannot say. I have no time to work on it for the foreseeable future, but here it is for the curious.

The code is contained in sidenotes.zip, at the bottom of the note. The sidenotes.indd file in the archive is a sample file for testing under Indesign, so need not cause any concern; it could be substituted with an .odt file for testing. On the same page there are links to other sidenote discussions also for Adobe Indesign, which may also be of use.

http://www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/sidenotes.html

I read discussion about how to make side notes in Writer documents few weeks ago. To write something outside the text area can be done by text frames, we know. But it can be make it follows dynamically the anchored position or not?
It can be prepared by the property of text frames. But it seems to arrange frames dynamically is difficult to write as a macro working on OOo.

I tried to make a simple macro as an example.

Very nice, Hanya!! I've had a very quick play with your file and it works very nicely. I'm going off the air later today for about ten days as I have to attend a meeting in Wales and am taking my aged mother for a short holiday en route, so have no time to study this in detail until I come back - packing to be done, car to be washed, all that sort of thing. When I'm back I'll try it again and make any comments that occur to me, if other users have not covered them in the time. Thanks for writing this.

It is the same than Insert/comment, that I can see in OOo 3.3?

mriosv wrote:It is the same than Insert/comment, that I can see in OOo 3.3?

No, mrisov, it is not. Insert Comment adds a Post-it type note to the side of the document ; the text of this will print at the bottom of the page if you enable "printing comments". The side note that Hanya has implemented starts as a footnote; if you run his macro it is turned into a "hanging shoulder note" rather than a footnote, aligned beside the paragraph/text it refers to. In some cases, when laying out a book with a wide margin, it is attractive to have hanging shoulder notes rather than footnotes. There is an illustration in the fourth post of
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and ... _id=0000ld

Hanya
I have just had a play with your example document, as a result of another thread I was involved in that brought up sidenotes. I have never tried to use them before but this really seems to be a useful macro you have produced. Are you planing to convert it to an extension at any time? I think quite a few people would find this useful.

This is not good to use with crowded document by sidenotes. You have to set up page styles yourself.