I am working with a lengthy Early Modern English chronicle with hundreds of archaic words, and want to put the definitions (glosses) in a sidebar, with the definition anchored to the word in the text. The sidebar would function like a permanent second column or margin wide enough for the short definitions. Basically, every page would have this sidebar. The key thing is that the definitions in the sidebar *have* to be anchored to words in the text so that the reader can easily look from difficult word to the sidebar to see the definition, then quickly return to the narrative. Shakespeare plays very often feature such a sidebar for glosses.



This project requires too many glosses for footnotes/endnotes to be efficient. The column function doesn't work for my purpose as the fixed text column would of course have wrapped text while the fixed sidebar would have a variety of short pieces of text. Tables also don't work. Finally, object anchoring doesn't seem to allow for anchoring words to definitions appearing in the sidebar.