Any solution for footnotes outside text frames?

[turner111]

Found this from five years ago, but not much else.

I sure hope there's a way to do this...

thanks

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

ID's TOC, Index, footnotes and endnote features have considerable formatting range, but are more or less locked to single, inflexible structures. You can use Cross-References fairly flexibly, though, and you could build an alternate footnote schema using it.

But if this is for print, you don't need any feature. Just set it up and style it manually.

If links are needed for electronic docs, crossrefs, combined with some artful styles, especially object styles, and some scripting, are about the only approach.

[Willi Adelberger]

Use endnotes as you can place their frames anywhere you want,

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

But can you divide up the frame... and will they update correctly? I've never taken it that far.

[Willi Adelberger]

Yes, as the Endnote's frames are normal text frames.

[turner111]

Thanks all.

The thing about footnotes is that they follow along. Early in a book that's pretty important.

Unfortunately, I'll have to find some workarounds.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

ID has some limits as a writing/composing tool. (I use both, but all in all, Word is the superior writing and composition tool.)

Why do you need the footnotes to be outside frames? ID handles them very well using its default methods.

[turner111]

Hey James -

Some footnotes are contained in image captions and callouts.

I've just got a pretty good track record of trying to do lots of stuff with features that haven't been added 🙂

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I figured it might be that. Pretty much a flow-breaker for footnotes. Most of the solutions I can bring to mind were doing it manually or changing the layout. Putting the footnote after a figure callout — "as you can seen in Figure 241² below" — etc.is one workaround.

(Now just imaging the forum didn't strip the superscript code from that 2...)

[Barb Binder]

Have you checked out @Peter Kahrel's footnote scripts? Maybe Footnotes to Margin Notes (with multiple placement options)? Please note that these are donationware, so if one works for you, please don't forget to make a donation. 

https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/footnotes.html

~Barb

[turner111]

Hi Barb - thanks! - no, I haven't, but I'll take a look today.