Floats and captions difficulties

["Martin Kolarík" <martin@mii.cz>]

Hi Hans,

I should want to get text around float (a side float) with the caption
positioned inside the margin. As I did not found such parameter(s) I peeked
into source code.

First, it seems to me, the \setupfloat making the sidefloat on existing
predefined float do not work. If I state:

\setupfloat[table][location=outer]
\placetable{caption}...

the table is properly placed, but the text do not float around. If I use:

\placetable[outer]{caption}...

everything is OK. Maybe I missed something, or this is an unpleasant feature
or a small bug :-)

For second, the first case, when the text does not float around, allows some
caption hacking. After studying sources sufficient for my needs is to define
minimalwidth=\rightmarginwidth and inside Command from
\setupcaptions[command=...] move the box with proper content into the
margin.

But there are the stuffs:

a) caption's width and minimalwidth do not work for sidefloat, as inner
doparfloat always uses \wd\tempfloatbox. So the modifying width of caption
is rather impossible.

b) the Command gets \hbox with another boxes inside. One should be able to
get the contents of theses boxes to reformat it (to correct width,
aligntment etc.), but this is not trivial and at least this reuired writing
a code highly dependent on current ConTeXt implementation of captions. This
is not good and again it makes the caption handling difficult.

Summary: I am able to (with some tricks) to put the caption in margin for
pagefloats, but the text is not floating around, or I am able to get the
text floating, but the caption is uncontrollable.

For me, the solution could be to adopt the behaviour of pagefloat widths
into sidefloat macro (and altough minimalwidth parameter is not the best
name for exact width, it works fine :-).

Thank you,

have a nice day,

Martin