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From: dhosek@freke.claremont.edu (Don Hosek)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: How to place note?
Message-ID: <1991Feb16.203050.1@freke.claremont.edu>
Date: 17 Feb 91 04:30:50 GMT
References: <1DCD977380000F16@post-office.uh.edu> <1991Feb17.013638.16362@csrd.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 53

In article <1991Feb17.013638.16362@csrd.uiuc.edu>, eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout) writes:
> ASOKOLOV@ESOC1.BITNET (Alex Sokolov IKI) writes:

>>             \ifodd\pageno
>>                  \leftline{\llap{\box0\qquad}}%
>>             \else
>>                  \rightline{\rlap{\qquad\box0}}%

> Indeed, this problem is less than trivial.

> Basically there are two approaches: 
> -- write an 
> output routine on the premisse that \vsize=\baselineskip,
> so that you always know where you are, or
> -- make a two-pass attack on the problem.
> -- run the job twice, once with all notes left, once right.

> The big K wrote a small piece about this problem
> in TUGboat, a couple of years ago. Title was
> (I think) `Jill's macros'.

I've attacked this problem twice. Once in my LaTeX style files
class at Texas A&M last year where after showing how to get
footnotes numbered within a page, we went on to create
environments that "stuck out" into the outside margin and a style
option for guaranteeing that margin pars are always in the
correct margin.

I also did the same thing in plain TeX for a local professor's
Geneology book; the macros were a modified version of the Knuth
macros: Knuth's macros work by only outputting every other page.
I thought that was stupid since it still required two passes and
every page was typeset anyway, so I rewrote the macros so that an
auxiliary file was used to check the positioning of the notes on
subsequent runs. That routine is currently "in the shop" since it
turned out that for some reason the routine puts all marginal
notes in the wrong margin for all pages divisible by 11. I
haven't looked at the code yet to fix it (the fix is a favor
being done in my scant spare time), but when it's fixed, I'll
try to isolate it and pop it in
[anonymous.tex.inputs.plain-contrib] on ymir.

-dh

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