Marginalia or Floating Text?

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Is there an out-of-the-box way to create “marginalia” text with DITA in XMetaL Author Enterprise 5.5.0.219? I see that XEP can support it for a PDF transformation, but not sure how to indicate it in the DITA markup in the first place.

Thank you.

R Palmer

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[Derek Read]

The DITA OT does not have any support for this that I know of. This means you have the added complexity, or flexibility (if you are an optimist) of deciding what markup will be used to put something in the margin. What this will come down to is a customization of the DITA OT's XSLT to generate XSLFO in a form that RenderX XEP will do what you want.

I have no idea how much work this would be, but one of our partners or our Professional Services team could look into it.

If you are lucky someone out there may have created a plug-in for the DITA OT that might help, though I suspect any such solution would probably be written specifically to solve a given organizations own needs.

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[gcrews]

I started dabbling with marginalia last week.  We are trying to create training materials with a student and instructor pdf format. The instructor pdf needs to have extra notes but that will not affect the page count so it’s always in sync with the student guides.  I posted about this on the dita-users yahoo group and got a good response from user renderxxep that pointed me to the 7th example on http://www.renderx.com/usecasestest.html it shows just what you are asking. If you know your way around the pdf customizations it’s possible, but tricky.  Hardest part is getting the margins just right.

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