Affinity Publisher: Note browser

[Pyanepsion]

Hello everyone,

When managing complex documents, you often need to find a specific note, for example, note 253. This currently involves browsing the entire document or searching for a textual occurrence. This process can become particularly laborious when the note in question uses a foreign writing format (उदाहरणम् in Sanskrit) or a generic annotation (such as ‘ibid’). The greater the number of notes, the more time-consuming this task becomes.

When you want to examine notes one by one, or return to a previous note, there’s no simple, straightforward way of doing so. It’s in this context that a note browser could greatly enhance the user experience.

Such a tool would offer several advantages:

1. Optimized annotation management: For voluminous projects such as thesis, technical or academic books, a note browser would enable easy navigation between annotations, without having to manually browse the document. This would boost productivity, especially for documents with a large number of references.
2. Easier organization and revision: Whether it’s footnotes, endnotes or side notes, as well as internal comments, a centralized tool would facilitate their consultation, verification and modification. By providing access to all notes in one place, it would considerably simplify editing and cross-reference management.

Contrary to what you might think, a note browser would not duplicate current functions, but would meet a specific need that is already being felt in text editors such as Word. It would also be an innovation ahead of competitors such as QuarkXPress and InDesign, giving Affinity Publisher a clear competitive edge.

However, care will have to be taken to ensure that the ergonomics are well thought-out, so as to avoid unnecessary interface overload, while maximizing the tool's efficiency.

Thank you in advance for your attention to this suggestion.

[MikeTO]

+1

I'd like to see:

• Go to a note selected in a list, like cross-refs, anchors, hyperlinks, and index markers
• Go to next/previous note, when the cursor is in a note or before/after a note marker - yes you can use the mouse but it would be nice to use a keyboard shortcut

It would be nice to also have "Go to note #", but it's not really practical given that note numbering can be restarted and there could be multiples of each note number. However, perhaps there could be a filter text field above the list similar to how the cross-references target list filter works, so you could start typing "253" and Publisher would show you notes with those numbers.