Dynamic Footnote in separate text box script

Hi Kirsty,

Footwork is a commercial product (Footwork - Id-Extras.com), but it sounds like it may be a solution.

With Footwork, you'd start with an InDesign document that has regular footnotes.

You would then use Footwork's "detach" feature, to move all doc footnotes into a separate text frame – they would become a separate story.

Footwork then allows you to lay out pages, and will adjust the size of the 2 text frames on each page (the top frame being for the main text, the bottom for the footnotes) automatically, to keep the footnotes in sync with the main text.

The advantage here, of course, is that the footnotes can now be laid out in columns, or run on, since they have become regular text.

The disadvantage is that they are not completely dynamic. If you edit text in the frames above, you would need to rerun Footwork from that page onwards to re-synchronize the footnotes from that point onwards with the main text.

On the other hand, Footwork's "detach" feature allows you to detach the footnotes and turn them into InDesign endnotes. These endnotes are then used as "fake" footnotes, as described above. So you can still set them in multiple columns, or run-on. And Footwork will sync them at the bottom of each page to align with the main text.

The advantage of using endnotes as fake footnotes is that deleting and inserting them becomes as easy as deleting and inserting endnotes. Plus, the numbering in the main text and footnote text does update automatically. But... you would still need to run Footwork when changes are made to the main text of footnotes, to resync everything if it goes out of sync.

So this all sounds a bit like what you're asking for. But if you told us more about your project, and what sort of layout you're trying to achieve, perhaps someone might have further suggestions...

Peter Kahrel has explored this area extensively with these scripts: https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/footnotes.html

Maybe one of these is what you have tried. The alternative to explore, as he mentions in this post, is to use crossreferences instead of footnotes, but you'd run into issues if the reference moves page but the text box remained static. Why do you need them in a separate box? There are ways to adjust the boxes so they work with your design, likely.