The ability to delay the renderings of objects provides several interesting applications. The first of these is rendering the text of footnotes at the end of a paragraph or section, rather than where the footnote marker occurs in the running text. Such a rule is useful when rendering documents having several footnotes.
Note that footnotes float to the end of the logical unit of text in which they occur, rather than to the end of a physical unit like a page. Page breaks are completely irrelevant in the context of audio formatted output, since they are merely a consequence of the constraints placed by the physical page.
The general ability to float any object in the document model is a more powerful feature than is present in standard typesetting systems, which typically allow only certain objects to be floated. In AsTeR , given object types [tex2html_wrap5878] and [tex2html_wrap5880] where instances of [tex2html_wrap5882] occur as sub-objects of instances of [tex2html_wrap5884], we can write a rendering rule that delays the rendering of all instances of [tex2html_wrap5886] until the enclosing instance of [tex2html_wrap5888] has been completely rendered. Thus, instances of [tex2html_wrap5890] float to the end of the enclosing instance of [tex2html_wrap5892].