Margin notes -- workarounds for no fo:float?

[Evan Driscoll <dr...@cs.wisc.edu>]

I'm checking out a few different toolchains for some stuff I'm going to
be working on, and one I'm considering is Docbook -> FO -> PDF using
FOP. (Actually there's an extra Asciidoc->Docbook step in there, but
that doesn't matter for this discussion much.) I apologize for
approaching this from the Docbook side slightly and not the actual FO input.

I'd like to be able to stick in margin notes. I found [1] which
describes a way that works in some other FO renderers (I tried it in XEP):
   <sidebar>
     <?dbfo float-type="margin.note"?>
     <title>Example</title>
     <simpara>blah blah blah</simpara>
   </sidebar>
but FOP just complains that fo:float isn't implemented.

I sort of expected this based on the comment at the top of the page
about side floats being new and mentioning a couple renderers but not FOP.


My question is whether there is some workaround. I found a few old
threads, and there didn't seem to be any suggestions better than "put
stuff in a table" which I really doubt would work for me.

I'm not all that hopeful, but I figured I'd ask.

(I'll probably put in a *little* effort to try to get margin notes via
tables and see automated I could make it. Maybe I can pull some XSL
tricks to make it relatively painless or something. The wildcard is what
the extra Asciidoc -> Docbook step will do to that.)


Thanks,
Evan


[1] http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/SideFloats.html