Is there a way to move all of a story's endnotes from a separate text frame into the main text frame (and keep them dynamic)?

Question

I have imported several word documents (sort of like individual chapters) into InDesign, so they appear as separate stories. The files have endnotes and footnotes, each of which appears correctly (yay!) aside from my having selected “Load the Place Cursor” and the endnotes appearing on the second page of the placed material (maybe that’s user error? I’m pretty new. I’ve been placing with shift + click). But that’s besides the point.

It seems that by default, the endnotes always appear in their own text frame (whether you are importing or you add an endnote using InDesign’s menu). Cutting and pasting seems to break the link between the reference and the text (the numbers change to <?> and you can’t go back and forth between the reference and the text by right clicking). Is there a way to move the dynamic endnotes into the story’s main frame? I mostly just don’t want to have to mess with the endnote text boxes if we end up moving the text around while we are fitting it, but we have the endnotes run in right after the end of each “chapter.”

Dave Creamer of IDEAS · Accepted Answer

I don’t know if this would work, but you can change the Endnote positioning options from On a New Page to Load the Place Cursor. Then reimport the Word file.

From the Help file: Select Load The Place Cursor to load the place cursor on inserting the first endnote for the defined scope. The place gun can be placed anywhere in the document and all the endnotes within that scope are added to this frame only.

Another option is to convert the Endnotes to Cross References.

Here is some info on a script: https://creativepro.com/topic/convert-endnotes-to-cross-references/

I don’t know if the script is still available or even works with new versions of InDesign. Here is a link to the scripts: https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesignscripts.html

Here is the script: https://github.com/ShinShinman/ID-scripts/blob/master/foot_to_end_dynamic.jsx

Peter Kahrel · Answer

​@Dave Creamer of IDEASis right, you can convert your endnotes to cross-referenced ‘normal’ paragraphs. There is no direct way to do this (as far as I know), but there is a script to convert footnotes to cross-referenced endnotes.First, convert your endnotes to footnotes. InDesign can do that for you (Type > Convert footnotes and endnotes).Then run the script to convert footnotes to cross-referenced endnotes. The notes will appear at the end of each story as part of the story, just what you wanted.The script is here:https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/foot_to_endnote.html(The github link that Dave posted has an old, out-of-date version of the script.)This may sound like a convoluted way of doing it, but it works well.

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