[darkpoet]

Whooboy, I've wasted dozens of hours on this peculiar puzzle and I finally have an answer. Most of my problem lay with the rendering of tables, columns, whatever... I tried a billion solutions, starting with Jellby's and evolving, simplifying, and more... all with similar results. A column that was too long could not be mixed with a floating column that was also too long. One of them would cut.

I reconsidered the intention of the text. Footnotes are often treated as afterthoughts when really they should be considered as another form of embedding.

So, I interspersed the footnote text into the text itself, using SPAN (similar as DIV but is allowed with a P... as so:

<p class="text">
<i>Gautama's Words.</i>
<span class="notes"><i>Parallel Passages</i></span></p>

<p class="text"><br />

<span class="notes">* "Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you my
brother, my sister? I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous 
upon me, all has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation 
(what have I to do with lamentation?)" [193: 71]. "The holy breath kills lust, 
passion and hate" [M. C. L. infra].</span>

Beloved, popular, respected among his fellows, victorious over discontent * 
and lust; over spiritual danger and dismay; will bestow upon him the ecstasy 
of contemplation; †

<span class="notes">† "Yet O my soul supreme! Knowest thou the joys of 
pensive thought? Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy 
heart?" [193: 147].</span>

will enable him to reach with his body, and remain in, those stages of 
deliverance which are incorporeal and pass beyond phenomena;

</p><br class="clear" />

In most of it, the footnote SPAN directly follows the original footnote symbol, excepting the first due to the quirk of the floating span.

The important bits of the CSS:

.text
	{
	width: 95%;
	font-size: 0.90em;
	margin-left: 2.5%;
	margin-right: 2.5%;
	margin-top: 0.75em;
	margin-bottom: 0;
	text-indent: 1.5em;
	text-align: justify;
	}

.notes {
	width: 55%;
	float: right; 
	font-size: 0.85em;
	margin-left: 2%;
	margin-right: 0;
	margin-top: 0;
	margin-bottom: 0;
	text-indent: 1.5em;
	text-align: justify;
}
.clear { clear: both; }

The most important bit of the CSS is that the width of the notes had to be more than half of the margins, even due to the cumulative effect of the font-size (the .text class is set to 0.90em so .notes class is set to 85% of that 90%)...

The effect is a lot like the original book... Since some areas do not have parallel text/footnotes, the text is free to expand to the right margin. Compare:





I just don't know if I have the patience to do this through the whole book. There are hundreds of sections like this and doing this feels like mutilating the text and profaning the point of using XML.