How to renumber Endnotes

[Ulrich Mayring]

Hello all,

I have a large document with many endnotes, but I didn't add them in sequence. Meaning that I first added an endnote on, say, page 14 and then later another on page 7. Later on I found that the one on page 7 has a higher number than the one on page 14. It appears that in some cases endnotes are added to the very end of the endnotes section, even if they are somewhere in the middle of my document.

So how can I tell Affinity Publisher to renumber my endnotes?

I have already tried to delete and re-add one endnote that was in the wrong place, but it is added back to the wrong place again. I have also tried to convert all endnotes to document settings (they were all created with document settings anyway), but that didn't help either.

Surely there must be a way to add endnotes to the middle of an existing document and have everything be renumbered?

Many thanks in advance for any pointers,

Ulrich

[MikeTO]

It sounds like some or all of your endnotes are "Custom" and not "Document-wide".

I recommend choosing "Revert All Endnotes to Document Settings" from the Notes panel menu and ensuring that your document-wide settings are the way you want them. To do that, select Document-Wide, click out of any text frame, and then you'll be able to set the document-wide settings.

Cheers

[Ulrich Mayring]

Hello Mike,

that is the first thought that came to my mind as well. Mind you, since I've been reading your excellent documentation, I did exactly what you recommended before starting with endnotes. I configured the document-side settings and converted all endnotes to document-wide after I created the first 2 or 3. At that point everything was fine. Then I started to add more endnotes and at one point I noticed that the numbering got messed up.

So, this is what happens, when I do "reset all endnotes to document settings" now: incredibly, the last two endnotes are merged into one. If I do it again, then the same thing happens again, meaning that now the last three endnotes are merged into one. After that I can repeat the operation and nothing more happens.

I attached three screenshots that show how this process goes. As you can see, no renumbering took place.

Furthermore, if I create a new endnote somewhere in the middle of my document, then it is always put at the very end of my endnotes and gets the last number. Therefore I need a way to renumber them anyway, much like the table of contents needs to be regenerated every time a new header is created. So how is this renumbering supposed to work, when you add an endnote in the middle of the text?

Kind regards,

Ulrich

[Ulrich Mayring]

Well, I think I found out why my endnotes are not put into the correct place. I have a large text flow, but there are images in-between that are pinned to a specific location in the text. Those images are in their own picture frame and have captions in a seperate text frame. When I add an endnote to such a caption, then it is put at the end - probably because the caption's text frame is not part of the text flow.

So what can I do here?

Kind regards,

Ulrich

[MikeTO]

11 minutes ago, Ulrich Mayring said:

Well, I think I found out why my endnotes are not put into the correct place. I have a large text flow, but there are images in-between that are pinned to a specific location in the text. Those images are in their own picture frame and have captions in a seperate text frame. When I add an endnote to such a caption, then it is put at the end - probably because the caption's text frame is not part of the text flow.

This is a limitation of notes in Affinity. If a note is inside a pinned object then it will be numbered separately from the story it is pinned to. There's no way to change this behaviour.

This workaround is a lot of work:

1. Create a note in the pinned frame. Make it custom and set its starting number to one more than the last marker before it in the text. You will have to manually renumber this should you add or delete a note before it.
2. Set the note following the pinned frame to be custom and set its starting number to one more than the pinned frame's marker. You will also have to manually renumber this.

But if you want the note to appear below the main text frame instead of below the pinned frame, it's a lot easier.

1. Create a note immediately before or after the pinned frame. Make it custom and set its marker to be invisible.
2. Create a cross-reference in the pinned frame where the note reference should appear. Set the cross-reference to paragraph containing the desired note and in the Text field choose the Note Number option. Format this number to match the real note references. You could create a character style for this if this is something you will do frequently.

Cheers

[Ulrich Mayring]

Hello Mike,

you are right that the first workaround is error-prone, because I will never know after a few months when I insert a new endnote whether I have to manually renumber something. I have a few hundred endnotes, so the numbering needs to be fully automatic.

I'm afraid I haven't fully understood your second idea. The endnotes should all appear at the very end of the document, after the main text flow. So if I create a cross reference, how is that automatically renumbered to fit with all the endnotes? And how does the endnote function know where it has to skip a number, because there is a cross reference?

Is there no command to tell Publisher to renumber all endnotes?

Kind regards,

Ulrich

[MikeTO]

5 hours ago, Ulrich Mayring said:

I'm afraid I haven't fully understood your second idea. The endnotes should all appear at the very end of the document, after the main text flow. So if I create a cross reference, how is that automatically renumbered to fit with all the endnotes? And how does the endnote function know where it has to skip a number, because there is a cross reference?

Is there no command to tell Publisher to renumber all endnotes?

No, there are only workarounds for this. Here's a test document and a screen recording showing how to make a cross-reference to a footnote or endnote. I used footnotes instead of endnotes for simplicity but the approach is identical.

crossref.afpub

 

 

[Ulrich Mayring]

This is a clever trick, so the actual footnote marker is invisible, but in the correct position. And then you insert a cross reference to the text of the invisible footnote where you want the marker to show. This will, however, only work to a certain extent, which is why you labelled it a workaround of course. Since there is no connection between the footnote and its marker (the cross reference), things might go awry with reformatting. It's also hard to see the invisible marker and, after a time, remember that there is one.

So what I did now is something different, which I hope will be more stable in the long run. Most of my endnotes are within the main text flow, so they are no problem. Only a few endnotes occur in image captions, but they do need to occur exactly there, because their text refers to the image (think: image credits or similar). So for those few cases I insert the image and its caption inline into the main text flow. That way the caption becomes part of the main text flow and endnote management works correctly.

And most of my images (all without endnotes) can still keep their caption in a seperate text frame, which makes it easier to move them to the desired position in the layout.