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Gazza875
Inspiring
January 10, 2025
Answered

Major Endnote Reordering Issue

  • January 10, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 892 views

Hi all,

So I am tasked to make edits to an existing 100+ government report, that was originally created by some ooutside agency. Some of these edits ares deleting/adding and reordering endnotes. For some reason in this document someone edited in some manual endnote and not the "Insert endnote" along the way. I am trying to fix that. So I deleted the Endnote pages at the end of the docment, all the manual ends in the body as well and started from #1 and redid them. All was well until i went to insert endnote #16.... when i do that in this document, it automatically makes #16 > #14 and makes the original #14, #15 above it into #15 and #16. So now 14 is below 15 and 16. And if I go to add what would be originally #17 it makes that one #15 and renumbers the 15 and 16 above it to 17 and 18... #14 stays tho in what should be the #16 endnote. 

What am i missing? Is there some underlying setting or macro or something that is dictating this. I figured removing the original endnotes and starting over would solve it, but it has happened on numerous tries.

 

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Matt

Correct answer Gazza875

Are your pages ordered/threaded correctly? Turn on View/Extras/Show Text Threads to see if the page frames are in the right order.

 

A hammer fix: delete the page frame on that frame, draw a new one, and re-link it into the threading.

 

ETA: A step two, on a copy of course, would be to delete that physical page, click away all the warnings, and then fix the text flow as needed. It's possible someone just dragged something somewhere it wasn't supposed to go, screwing up page and content ordering in a non-obvious way.


Got it! So for some crazy reason this whole booklet was set up as individual text blocks, not one running link text, from page to page. So I removed the text block that was having the issue,  inserted that copy into the text box on the top of the the page and then linked a new box blow and inserted 16 and it worked.. added 17 and 18 and it was fine in that same text block. Will have to pay attention to this across the rest of this book see if it happens elsewhere. 

 

What would cause that specific text block to have this issue and not the other individual blocks?

3 replies

Robert at ID-Tasker
Robert at ID-Tasker
Legend
January 10, 2025

@Gazza875 

 

Can you share your file? You can click my nickname if it's confidential.

I have a great tool that will check internally what is going on with your document.

 

Instead of removing all and starting from scratch - you could've just added/converted "manual"/wrong ones into automatic ones - InDesign would re-number them.

 

    Mike Witherell
    Community Expert
    Mike WitherellCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 10, 2025

    It wouldn't hurt to try washing the file out to IDML and back to clean it. But if someone did some manual cheating of the file, it could have left behind broken parts. For example, I have seen that copy and pasting sections of text frames with complicated links of any sort can leave the current document in a state of confusion.

    Mike Witherell
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    January 10, 2025

    At a very rough guess with no further information, it sounds as if there are remnants of endnote markers in the text. Deleting the number by manual selection might sometimes leave the actual marker tag in place, causing chaos when you try to add and update the notes.

     

    Try this, on a copy of the document: use GREP search to find any endnote marker, using ~U as the wildcard. You could just search through and delete any oddities you find, but I'd recommend starting ALL the way over and do a GREP find/replace for that marker, replacing it with nothing (a null string).

     

    Then delete the Endnote frame, and try entering a few new notes to see if things progress more sensibly.

     

    It might also be worth doing the purge thing with the doc after you delete all markers: save as IDML, open that and save as INDD under a new name. That will fix broken structure that might be part of or contributing to the problem.

    G
    Gazza875Author
    Inspiring
    January 13, 2025

    Hi James, so that didn't work. It worked up until i entered #16. It did exactly what it has been doing. It makes 16 into 14, and 14 and 15 above it into 15, 16.

     

    So I think I did what you suggested. I opened my current doc, saved it under a new name. DId the GREP search for ~U and replaced all with nothing. 15 changes made. And in that doc I only had 15 endnotes created at that point. Then I removed the endnote page at the back, saved it under a v2 name as a IDML. Opened that, saved it as a INDD file and started from #1 again. It all went wrong again once I hit 16.

     

    Anymore ideas? This is frustrating.

     

    Thanks

    Matt 

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    January 13, 2025

    Yeah, wow, you got one broken file there. (And in other news...)

     

    Do you have any Sections defined in the document? Do any page icons in the Page pane have a little down-arrow over them, other than the first? (Delete them if so.)

     

    That about exhausts my guessing. I'd have to see the doc (via private dropbox etc. is fine) to have any other useful input.

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