I guess I find it more elegant to handle the punctuation like this:
<span class=”variants”> <span class=”variant”>v1</span><span class=”variant”>v2</span></span>

.variants::before { content: ‘(’ }
.variants::after { content: ‘)’ }
.variant + .variant::before { content: ‘,’ }

This avoids the whole need to pre-process with XSLT to add first-of-type and last-of-type and it also keeps track of the structure of the document.

Sidenotes are probably best handled with floats and negative margins in CSS. The idea is that you float a sidenote to the side and then use a negative margin value to push it outside the box from where the sidenote naturally appears.

Unfortunately, Prince6 has a bug where floats may overlap when pushed fully outside their box. The bug has a workaround: ensure that there is a tiny bit of overlap. Both the bug and the workaround can be seen here:

http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2008/tests/float.html
http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2008/tests/float.pdf

Column-span isn’t implemented yet, but page-floating content will span multiple columns. So, you can make the first heading span multiple columns by way of:

h1 { float: top }

I use that technique in this document:

http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2008/wikipedia/s2.pdf

The document has been created with this command:

prince –no-author-style -s http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2008/wikipedia/wiki2.css http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union -o s2.pdf

-h&kon

In the updated version, I also added an image and a locator (letter header). I haven’t included tables still since table support shouldn’t really be a version 1 feature.

A couple of points. The .xhtml file included will not load in Oxygen or PrinceXML. It complains of character problems.

I wonder if the right way is to put the first-of-type inside the class attribute or if a separate attribute should be created for this? The converted file looks excessively bloated with such long designators.

I also noticed the sample has complicated text formatting but doesn’t include the more complicated elements of dictionary formatting: including pictures and tables. On our page of samples, these were included.

There seems to be a discussion of how to describe the letter headers in section 14 of:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-css3-gcpm-20070504/ (I found crop marks discussed in the same document.) It also describes how to place pictures in the ways we want.

So it is a good start. I don’t know if PrinceXML implements enough of this working group article to allow us to use it for these purposes. For us to implement it, we may need to set our priorities too.