Re: PDF "dirty" trick

["Giuseppe Bilotta" <oblomov@freemail.it>]

> At 05:54 PM 9/17/00 +0200, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
> >
> >> That's _exactly_ what I wanted (even too much :-)).
> >
> >Overrule :-)
> >
> >I did some experimenting (help text that toggle, etc), and there is
> >something more that I want now.
>
> You're greedy -)
>

Oh yes I am :-)

> >Precisely, I'd like something like the comments as they are dealt with in
> >WordPerfect for Windows: in page view, the presence of a comment is
> >displayed as a little ballon in the margin. If you click on it, a balloon
> >with the comment text is displayed; the "foot" of the ballon points to
the
> >place where the comment is inserted, and the balloon itself is put where
> >there is enough space on screen.
>
> I'm not sure if balloons are available in all viewers.

Doesn't matter. The _shape_ is not important.

>
> \startcomment
>   hello beautiful\\world
> \stopcommentaar
>
> \startcomment[hello]
>   hello \<< \'e\'erste \>>
>   beautiful
>   world
> \stopcomment
>
> \startcomment[hallo][color=green,width=4cm,height=3cm]
>   hello \<< \'e\'erste \>>
>   beautiful
>   world
> \stopcomment
>
> \startcomment[hello][color=green,width=4cm,height=3cm]
>   hello \<< \'e\'erste \>>
>
>   beautiful
>
>   world
> \stopcomment
>
> \startcomment[symbol=Balloon]
>   Do we want this kind of rubish? And, why isn't this and
>   some more features related to text annotations so poorly
>   (actually not) documented? Anyhow, by providing this
>   functionality we demonstrate that \pdfTeX\ can do it. By
>   the way, it's funny that when in Acrobat we scale up the
>   text, the symbols scale down.
> \stopcomment
>

*sigh*

No, this is not what I wanted. I mean, this is the first thing I tried (with
pdfLaTeX, btw). But you cannot get "strangely" typeset material in this
comments. You see, I'd need something like the solution you sent me in the
help.zip file, combined with this.

What I currently do is preparing an \pdfxform with the material I want to
put in this pop-up whatever (balloon, boxes ... we'll think about the shape
later -)). Then I discovered I could not put the xform in a note (comment in
ConTeXt). Your "help" solution is more or less what I want to obtain, but it
still lacks some "features":

1) I couldn't make it work inline: only in the footer.

2) I managed to turn the "show" button in a "toggle" button. But this way,
the "hide all that help" button doesn't work (it only hides shown helps,
doesn't toggle off toggled on helps).

3) if I understood correctly, it appears in a fixed place in the document,
while I would like it to appear in the visible part of the document (thus,
if the line the note referst to is at the bottom of the _screen_ [not page],
the note should appear above; if the line is at the top, the note should
appear below).

Any ideas?

Giuseppe Bilotta