Thank you Bryan, Brian and Bob for your suggestions.
Indeed a table-based solution, with hidden borders, is something I
considered Bryan, but as you rightly point out, it would add a lot of
unnecessary rows to the table. This is undesirable a) because many of my
users are inexperienced and greatly appreciate the simplest wikitext b) it
would badly reflow the text when the browser window is resized.
Brian, your solution is worth a try. It would clutter the text with span
tags and my users wouldn't be particularly happy with that, but the
solution I'm currently resorting to (see answer to Bob) is not much
different.
Bob, indeed using references and cite was the first thing I tried even
though it meant abandoning the original document format. Eventually I
switched from references to the SimpleTooltip extension. This way the
information contained in the tips is available in-context and I can still
use references/footnotes when appropriate.
Thank you all again for your answers.
Kind regards,
Manu
On 11 November 2017 at 15:35, Emanuele D'Arrigo <manu3d(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi everybody!
I'm in the process of manually converting a number PDF documents to wiki
pages. The work is mostly straightforward copy&paste.
There is one feature of the original PDFs document however that is hard to
convert.
To simplify the issue, imagine that document has a two columns layout, one
column quite wide and the other, much narrower (say 85%/15%) width.
The wide column is full of normal text with some structure (i.e. sections,
paragraph and lists). The narrow column has small sparse notes (i.e. dates
and people's names) that relate to specific lines of text in the wide
column: in the PDF a note is at the same height as the line of text it
relates to.
Obviously, in a static PDF this works, but in a browser window the text in
the wide column will reflow depending on the size and ratio of the window.
Therefore, how do I ensure that the note in the small column remains at
the same level with the portion of text it relates to? Effectively, how do
I anchor the y-position of an element in a column of a wikitable to the
y-position of, say, a specific word in another column of the same wiki
table?
Kind Regards,
Manu