How Do I Count Footnotes?

[Rachel386807735xn6]

Hello,

I'm working on a book, and I need to find out how many footnotes I have. I hate to go through and count them all manually. Is there a place I can go to see how many footnotes the document has?

[Peter Kahrel · Accepted solution]

There isn't, but this one-liner tells you how many footnotes your document has:

alert ('Footnotes: ' + app.activeDocument.stories.everyItem().footnotes.length);

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

A quick script is always a good solution, but one I've used on-the-fly (for a book in which I need to know how many short encyclopedia-like entries there are, for example) is to do a search and replace for the paragraph character on a key style. My example has one "date" paragraph in each entry, so if I F/R for the return using that style, it gives me an exact count.

If you've (properly) used a defined Footnote style, the same hacky-trick should give you an accurate count.

Or, you know, you could use a script, too. 🙂

[Peter Kahrel]

True, find/replace can often be used to count things. But single-paragraph footnotes don't have the paragraph character, so you'd have to go for another character. Which is pretty scary.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay, then. It works really well for most item counts. 😛