Participating Frequently

Question

End notes at the end of each chapter?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
January 31, 2023
3 replies
3690 views

Hello and thanks for looking at this question:

I am working with a book manuscript (in Word) — 30+ chapters with endnotes at the end of each chapter. Each chapter's endnote numbering begins with 1.

What's the most efficient way to import and work with this? Do I need to place one chapter at a time? How do I keep each set of endnotes showing up in the right place with fresh numbering, without losing the flow of pages from one chapter to the next?

The book is only going to be published in print, not an e-book.

Thank you.

A2D2

Inspiring

Coming to this very late but personally I have never attempted to map styles from Word to ID when importing...rather I always clear all styles, just preserving local overrides...that way you get a much cleaner document without saving the Word doc in an RTF (which sounds a bit counterintuitive to me and, from memory, I suspect, it is not "pure" rich text but Word adds its own things on top)

Peter Kahrel wrote scripts which I use in CS6 which convert footnotes to endnotes and they are placed at the end of the story ... not as a separate story. From memory, if one note is added or deleted it does not renumber the whole series.

For his updated endnote scripts see here: https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesignscripts.html

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Most of this is driven by personal/workflow preference, experience and end needs. I, too, usually clear all styles in importing Word docs, but that means you have to work with a PDF or other visual master to reassign heading levels and alternate body styles correctly. Importing a doc with styles and mapping them carefully as you do gives a better working start, but probably means more spot cleanup as you go. (Remapping Word spot formatting to character styles helps a lot, although it can be tedious and fussy.)

But the real crux here is whether the notes need to remain live (linked) or can be turned to dead text. I usually prefer to put in the extra effort to keep the links live, as much for downstream EPUB export as anything else, but then I run into things like the current textbook where some points have three to five endnotes... and the author's preferred style is to collapse them into a dashed pair ("100, 101, 102, 103, 104" becoming "101-104" etc.) Since you can't delete live note markers without deleting the associated note and forcing a renumbering, I had to back up and go to a dead-text model. (Yes, there are workarounds that make the unwanted links invisible, etc. — didn't want to go there.)

End notes are a headache at best, and a migraine when importing from Word unless the author has been meticulous in setting them up and/or you put in the effort to make the import as seamless and flaw-free as possible. But all else is that personal/workflow choice and there aren't any absolute answers.

A2D2

Inspiring

Sure, personal preference and workflow is the final arbiter but, just to clarify, I clear the style when importing (placing) the text from Word ... I don't touch the actual word file.

I have found the following workflow to be good for me:

1) place word dcoument, keeping local overrides only

2) apply character styles where needed e.g. italics and superscripts

3) remove all overides in a document using a script

4) apply paragraph styles as required while comparing to original word document

Author's seldomly are experts in formatting so I would rather "rebuild" the format of a document from clean text rather than import the formatting and try to make good.

Some publishers accept this approach but help the designer by having the document tagged e.g. <A> for first-level headings, <B> for second-level headings etc. So the text is still imported clean but there is no need for the designer to refer back to the document to figure out what the author is trying to do.

machepapAuthor

Participating Frequently

For anyone who comes along looking for answers to similar quesitons, I'm finding that I can't cut and paste endnotes to the bottom of chapters so that they appear in the right place without losing the endnote reference numbers in the body text. For now I'm making a separate file for each chapter and putting them together as a book file. Once I have everything else worked out, I'll go through and move the text boxes into position at the end of each chapter. Fussy, but it seems to work.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Huh. I am pretty sure I've pasted end notes back into the main flow successfully. Maybe I'm overlooking a step. Let me tinker a bit.

If you are not publishing it in any e-format, broken links shouldn't matter, though.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

I think you are faced with the unlikeable task of managing each chapter separately. ID allows end notes to be placed at the end of a document, or at the end of a story.

The straightforward way to do it would be to place each chapter in an INDD file and use a Book file to group them. That can get ponderous to keep styles in sync, etc.

The alternative would be to place each chapter in its own set of text frames, or 'story,' within one INDD file. That simplifies a lot of layout and style tasks, but can get hard to manage in other ways. I am also not sure if the numbering could be restarted from story to story (it's inherent in file to file under a Book).

In any case, start with the cleanest, most organized Word doc you can manage. Do all structural cleanup, assign styles meticulously, remove all multiple whitespace and extra returns, all that. Then import the first chapter using careful style mapping at the Place step and optimize everything before you continue with a template drawn from that first INDD chapter file. End notes should present no unsual problems after that, but be aware they can "break" easily and you may have to purge each Word file (save to RTF, reopen as Word) to get rid of deadweight content and fix broken links.

There might be a place for Word macros in all the cleanup and in breaking the ms into 30 or so separate placement files. I would NOT cut material from the whole ms and try to paste it into InDesign, either stories or files. Use the Place menu and click to pass through the Import Options menu on each one.

machepapAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the detailed reply. I plan to go over this a few times and try steps one at a time to make sure I understand it all.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Ask away if you have questions or run into snags. I'm just one of many here who have done a lot of Word-into-ID import, and while there are hurdles, it's a very polished and well-mapped process. There are solutions and workarounds for almost any glitch.

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