Added Tufte-Style Sidenotes

Now is the time ¹1Now? Really? for all good men to come to the aid of the party.

So they work!

I’m a big fan of scholarly apparatus generally, but sadly Drupal’s glossary module is too complicated and its footnote module has cumbersome markup. Moreover, both seem optimized for Drupal’s complicated — and in my experience, dangerously crash-prone — WYSIWYG editor, CKEditor.

So I was pleased to see a sidenote module released, optimized for the simple, rugged, and safe editor I prefer, BUeditor. So I broke my rule of never trusting anything alpha, beta, or under development, and installed it.

Here is what Edward Tufte [genuflects] has to say about sidenotes, coming as he does from world of beautiful books:

The problem fundamentally arises from the 8.5 inch page width. That is too wide for a single column of type; thus 2 columns of text are often used in books with an 8.5 inch page width. In general, a line of text should not be more than 2 or 3 alphabets long, unless there is spacious leading. (An unsatisfactory solution is to make the type real big to fill the horizontal width.)

So what should be done with that extra space on the right of the page when a single column of text is used? The design of my books and of Feynman’s book puts small images²2For example: , image credit lines, numbered notes, and references out in a narrow righthand column³3Margin width is 18rem, or (16px * 1.5) * 18px = 432px, given that 16px is the font size for paragraphs, so I resized the graphic accordingly.

Though you’ll have to fiddle with the image’s positioning..

In scholarly work, the main purpose of footnotes or sidenotes is to acknowledge and credit sources, and to refer to other relevant work. This is a moral obligation in scholarship.

But footnotes should not be overdone or pretentious, as is often the case in PhD dissertations. Also don’t build in little all-too-knowing commentaries into the references, a graduate student disease, as in “the seminal article by G. P. K. Sitzplotz, [reference].”Sometimes acknowledgments can be put into the text, although vague insider eponymic references (a “Downsian model,” a “Derridaist reading”) that as Gore Vidal once said “cause the reader’s brow to furrow,” should be avoided. (Note the runnng reference to Vidal in the text here.) In general, using sidenotes or footnotes to conduct a continuous running commentary underneath the main text is probably not a good idea. If the material is important enough to discuss, then it may well belong in the main text. That is the general theory. Personal style is another and more complicated matter, and what follows is my peculiar view, which probably has little relevance to other writers.

Quite often I use sidenotes as detailed annotation or as a sidebar extension or a reinforcing detail to support the main text and, when doing so, try to include small images along with words–especially where such material would break up the main text if included there (better to interrupt the flow with a sidenote). I believe that such material should be almost entirely content-driven, rather design-driven–although at times, when I see a big empty sidenote column, I see a tempting opportunity to fill the space.

There is even a CSS library for sidenotes:

Sidenotes are a great example of the web not being like print. On sufficiently large viewports, Tufte CSS uses the margin for sidenotes, margin notes, and small figures. On smaller viewports, elements that would go in the margin are hidden until the user toggles them into view. The goal is to present related but not necessary information such as asides or citations as close as possible to the text that references them. At the same time, this secondary information should stay out of the way of the eye, not interfering with the progression of ideas in the main text.

1. Select some text.
2. Click the SN button in the toolbar.
3. Your text will be surrounded by ⁴4…
4. Click Save.

A sample:

[ sn ]This is a sidenote[ /sn ]

produces a sidenote like this:

⁵5This is a sidenote..

Fun stuff!

UPDATE See here on the relation between footnotes and sidenotes.