I am part of the group that will be encoding a portion of this edition of Arrian's The Campaigns of Alexander. As you can see by the image that Caleb provided in his post, there is a lot of text on the page in addition to the main narrative history. These include footnotes, marginalia, and captions for images. We want to make sure that we include all of this information along with the text as we encode.
One of the interesting features that we noticed was that each footnote is unique. A lot of books will start numbering their notes for the first chapter at 1 and proceed numerically until they reach a new chapter, at which point they will start at one again. This book tells you exactly where each foot note belongs. For example, one of the footnotes on our selected portion is designated 3.13.4a. Reading it from left to right it tells you it is from book 3, chapter 13, section 4, first note. This is incredibly detailed metadata, and we haven't even looked at the actual contents of the footnote.
While the footnotes provide detailed information about the text, the marginalia group the sections and provide short summaries. It is a great navigational tool that allows the reader to skim through the book to find precisely what they're looking for. While this is an incredible feature, the question as always is how we will reflect this in our code.
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