Shorten 10+ Endnote Ref Numbers into a "Range"

[amandaw68339072]

Hey all,

I’m writing because I have an endnote issue that I’ve never dealt with before.

I have an instance of 12 endnote reference numbers (enref) at the end of one sentence (see image below). As you can see, it looks quite awkward, and the client has requested an en dash between the note numbers:

Unfortunately, when I manually input an en-dash, surprise, it becomes “12-13”, when I really want it to be “12-23”. I’m not even sure if this is possible. Manually creating a new text box, setting it to non-print, etc, might be my best bet but I'm hoping to avoid that. 

For reference:
– I imported the endnotes via a Word (docx) document in which all the enref and their accompanying note are all already linked
– All notes correctly and automatically went to the end of the InDesign document
– Each chapter has been broken into a Story, so the enref start from 1

Any advice? 

The closest I could find in this community was this thread, which wasn't really answered, as it didn't seem like we had exactly the same goal:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/range-of-endnotes/m-p/9899686?page=1

[tacoeater]

Hello@amandaw68339072 ,

This is a interesting question. What you are actually wanting is Maths, finding a min number than a max and deleting everything inbetween. Short answer is, out of the box indesign doesn't do maths, its primary function is page layout. However it does have access to a scripting engine. Finding the min and max value would be fairly straight forward.

Regards

[amandaw68339072]

Thanks for this! Yes, unfortunately, my script knowledge is pretty non-existent, and this seems like the sort of thing a script could be useful for (the most I can do is install and run them, haha). Maybe I can find someone who could build or has built something similar to this...I'll do some digging. Thanks again.

[amandaw68339072 · Accepted solution]

UPDATE: We decided to leave the en-ref numbers as is.

After investigating, I've come to believe this just isn't possible in InDesign as of CC 2020. The only workaround was to either condense all the notes into one note, which was an editorial correction, and preferred; or “fake it”, and set the numbers in No Fill, and manually type and kern the superscript “12-23”, which was not very fun as en dashes rarely have superscript support. This could have been manually set from the beginning if the enref were not dynamic/linked. I'll ask for static notes next time.