Annotated Documents in a Large Documentary Collection with InDesign

[Joshua Powell]

Hello Everyone,

I'm hoping someone might have some advice for us. We're assembling a scholarly collection of documents of varying lengths. We're facing some design challenges that our usual tools (chiefly MSW) are simply not up to and we'd like to know how, or whether, what we need can be conveniently accomplished using InDesign.

The challenge is this: our documents are annotated transcriptions of historical texts. The texts themselves often have footnotes of their own. The documents are also annotated by scholars working on our project. We'd like to include the annotations as endnotes following each document, while maintaining the footnotes included in the originals. I've attached a mockup of the kind of thing I'm talking about. Bear in mind that each volume includes a few hundred documents more or less like the representation in the mockup. These document each need to flow one after the other, while including endnotes after each and footnotes wherever they show up.

Any advice on how might we best accomplish this with InDesign?

Thank you for your time.

[Dick Margulis]

On 12/31/2014 11:40 AM, Joshua Powell wrote:

The challenge is this: our documents are annotated transcriptions of historical texts. The texts themselves often have footnotes of their own. The documents are also annotated by scholars working on our project. We'd like to include the annotations as endnotes following each document, while maintaining the footnotes included in the originals. I've attached a mockup of the kind of thing I'm talking about. Bear in mind that each volume includes a few hundred documents more or less like the representation in the mockup. These document each need to flow one after the other, while including endnotes after each and footnotes wherever they show up.

Any advice on how might we best accomplish this with InDesign?

In principle this is pretty simple.

In Word, treat each text as a separate document (this is important, because of the way Word treats endnotes). Footnotes are footnotes. Endnotes are endnotes. It's generally preferable to have a different numbering system for each (perhaps asterisk, dagger, etc., for footnotes and arabic numbers for endnotes. However, if you are matching the original text's footnote system, you may have to be a bit more creative and give up on the idea of consistency in this regard.

When each document is placed into an InDesign file, the footnotes will appear at the foot of the page and the endnotes will come in at the end of the document.

I think it would be preferable to begin each new text on a new page, but if the quantity of material and the shortness of the texts suggest that they should just flow one after the other, you can do that too. The main thing is that each text should be a separate Word document and should then be placed individually in InDesign. If you prepend the Word files with sequence numbers, so that they sort in the folder in the correct order, it will be a straightforward process to place them in sequence.

[Michael Brady]

Joshua

> Any advice on how might we best accomplish this with InDesign?

What Dick said.

ID is much more expensive than MSW because it is much much more robust in doing layouts (and it has a pretty good word processor within it).

Dick and I just participated in a discussion on another list about almost exactly what you are facing, namely, handling endnotes and footnotes in MSW and ID. ID can do it if the two note streams are separated in MSW, that is, one is a sequence of endnotes and one is of footnotes. The other factor is that the two sets of notes use different callout tokens, typically arabic numbers for endnotes and symbols for footnotes. If you set up the endnotes in MSW to use arabic numbers, then you can use ID's Document Footnotes feature to assign symbols to the footnotes.



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Michael Brady

[Andrew Brown]

On 31 déc. 2014, at 17:40, Joshua Powell <jmp...@g.uky.edu> wrote:

> The challenge is this: our documents are annotated transcriptions of historical texts. The texts themselves often have footnotes of their own. The documents are also annotated by scholars working on our project. We'd like to include the annotations as endnotes following each document, while maintaining the footnotes included in the originals. I've attached a mockup of the kind of thing I'm talking about. Bear in mind that each volume includes a few hundred documents more or less like the representation in the mockup. These document each need to flow one after the other, while including endnotes after each and footnotes wherever they show up.
>
> Any advice on how might we best accomplish this with InDesign?

InDesign is still in its infancy in this sort of area, and may well never leave it since most of its potential customers have stopped printing books.

In your shoes I would place the original notes at the end of each document (since they do not need automatic numbering) and the scholars' notes at the foot of the page. There are arguments in favour of this approach, apart from convenience: readers will probably be more interested in the new notes than the old, and the new notes will be conveniently situated on the right page; and you can add footnotes to the old notes since they will be simply part of the main text flow.

AB