Two sets of footnotes in InDesign

In the latest edition of InDesign CC is it possible to thread the endnote story accross pages? So to have two series of 'footnotes' in a document we would have as follows:

• Series 1: built-in footnotes at bottom of page
• Series 2: built-in endnotes in independent story which is threaded according at will e.g. at the end of the story, end of the book, from page margin to page margin.

Would this work?

So this would be what the Footwork v.3 plugin does?

It may be useful to keep in mind that, of course, multiple series of footnotes is a fairly basic feature in InDesign if they are relating to different stories. But the purpose of this conversation is the best way to get multiple series of footnotes for THE SAME STORY.

As has already been identified, a key consideration for multiple series of footnotes is to figure out the references for the multiple series. Some series can get pretty ugly if they get too long e.g. Roman numerals, letters, or asterisks and daggers ... but if the series is short or restarts each page it should be fine.

@James Gifford—NitroPress To build upon a previous comment about critical editions (e.g. of ancient texts). The need for multiple series of footnotes arises, for example, when a text is published and then the editor has a series of footnotes to mention alternative spellings or words given in different manuscripts; and then in another series of footnotes the editor provides commentary on the text. There are other ways to do this and some scholarly texts have a system of 'critical apparatus' (apparatus criticus; 'app crit') where they refer to line numbers rather than use notes ... but, yes, this is a pretty niche area.

The image below is from page 90 of Richard Fitznigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, and Constitutio Domus Regis: The Dialogue of the Exchequer, and The Disposition of the Royal Household ed. and trans. ‎Emilie Amt (OUP, 2007). Series: Oxford Medieval Texts.

Link on Google Books: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Dialogus_de_Scaccario_and_Constitutio_Do/qZ8VDAAAQBAJ

Hmm! … Not sure a complex approach would be necessary. 😉

Quickly manually done for test but:

• Only using the InDesign basic "Footnote" feature [all the footnotes in the screenshot are true footnotes]

• About the 2 footnotes numberings [1, 2,  … (on document) and †, ††, … (on page)] and the placing of the original endnotes [†, ††, …] at the bottom of each page under the orginal footnotes [1, 2, 3, …], it could be done by a Script.

(^/)  The Jedi

P.S. My main concern with what you've stated is the star dagger system for numbering 1000 endnotes.

If I'm not mistaken (but please double check), with endnotes you cannot tell the numbering to restart on every page as you can with footnotes.

This means that, towards the end of the book, you will end up with an endnote number that includes a thousands daggers, stars, and the rest of it. That can't be right!

Hi @Aditya29661206czt4 

If you've got a document that has 8000 regular InDesign footnotes, and 1000 regular endnotes, and you simply want the endnotes to appear at the bottom of each page rather than at the end of the each chapter, such a layout is supported by my (not free) Footwork add-on: https://www.id-extras.com/products/footwork/

It will lay out the pages for you: It shortens the main text frame on each page to make just the right room for the endnote frame, and then threads the endnote story at the bottom of each page, resizing it to fit.

It makes sure the correct endnotes appear on each page automatically.

In the second screenshot on the page I linked to above, you'll see a similar layout. Except that here Footwork is managing (i.e. automatically placing the frame on each page and making it the right size) the second text (which is a translation of the main text, and is a separate, regular InDesign story), and the second set of footnotes (which are simply a commentary on the translation) are regular InDesign footnotes (so there are no endnotes).

But it can work fine with endnotes too.

I think this configuration is pretty common, so though I agree with @James Gifford—NitroPress that often too many comments on a page and double sets of footnotes, or very long footnotes, are a sign of poor planning on the author's part, nevertheless in many cases of complex critical texts double sets of footnotes are required and are the best and simplest method to handle everything neatly.

I'd be happy to work on a complex typesetting project like this with Footwork!

Please advise best course of action.

I assume running away very fast is not "best"? 🙂

My first thought is that I hope this project is in meticulously created and maintained Word, because documents of vastly smaller scale can spin problems left and right trying to get footnotes, endnotes and especially both to import without fault... as a start. My second thought is that I hope it's not all one Word file, because an Eiffel Tower made of blown glass would be more stable to work with.

But that aside, I think the author is being quite unreasonable. I've never seen a book of any type, including bilingual books on complex topics like theology, that needed a double footnote system. Footnotes are footnotes, conceptually, functionally and in overall information presentation. End notes are the same things but to different ends. Trying to double them, blend them, etc. indicates (nine times out of ten) an author who really doesn't know what they're doing, or what they're asking of either the designer or the reader. The information should be divided between (page) footnotes and (chapter-end) end notes, according to very, very mature publishing and information-management rules.

It will come as no surprise that InDesign can't handle a double set of either, and nor can any publication tool I know of, including the mighty FrameMaker. There's a reason they don't support this model: see above.

It's possible scripting and/or an elaborate automation system (which is Robert's specialty) could make it happen, but it's likely to be a "dead link" setup wherein after conversion, the reference markers and referenced text have to be managed manually. It would take whopping effort to create a plugin, of any kind that could let you double up the two features in an automated, interactive way.

So I suggest one of the two following options:

• Tell the author they are being unreasonably complicated with their presentation, which cannot be easily handled by even the best layout and publication system, and get them to choose footnote-v-endnote for each of these 9,000 elements.
• Or, tell the author who wishes to reinvent book format to the end goal of total unreadability that it's going to be a manual job, and the hours and per-page costs are going to mount up in equally staggering fashion.

Or just run. Some jobs are just not worth any fee because getting to a mutually acceptable result, and full payment, may be somewhere between "not worth it" and impossible.

Can they be mixed - or each one as a separate block of text?