How to Use Symbol and Numbered Footnotes Together on the Same Page in InDesign

Forum|Forum|8 days ago
March 28, 2026
2 replies
55 views

Dear all,

I encountered one problem regarding footnotes in InDesign and hope you can help me with. I have a magazine with articless and in the beggining of each article is author´s name and short info what the article is about. The thing is that author has a footnote with * and info about article footnote with **

The article itself has a standard footnotes with numbers 1, 2, 3 etc.

So I would like to know if there is any chance to combine * and numbers in footnotes on same page? I am wondering how to figure it out hoping that someone has a solution of this problem. I believe that InDesign has a feature how to deal with it.

Thank you very much for your help.

TᴀW

Legend

@Barb Binder solution works here, because you know that the “about the author” and “about the article” footnotes will always appear first, so you can always place them safely above footnote 1 as regular text.

Of course, if there is no “real” footnote 1 on the first page, you’d need a different workaround.

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Barb Binder

Community Expert

We can't change numbering styles for notes, they are all symbols, or incrementing numbers or letters.

I accomplish this with a cut/paste:

Select and cut the * note text, leave the number at the beginning
Delete the 1 in the text and add a *. The footnotes now renumber from 1.
Click at the beginning of the 1 in the note at the bottom of the page, press enter, arrow up, type in the * and the spacer character and paste in the * note.

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

T

Tom VavrusaAuthor

Participating Frequently

Dear Barb,

Thank you very much for your reply. This works for * and then for 1, 2, 3…

But if I want to replace note number 1 with ** the footnote which was originally * disappears, because it was on the same footnote line as number 1separated with “enter”

:(

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Add them all as sequentially numbered notes, 1–infinity. Then repeat the process I showed above. For multiple-author bylines, mine might be 4-6 deep.

If this isn’t quite what you need, please share screenshots or a sketch so that we can see where you are starting , and where you need to go.

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

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