Footnotes/Endnotes

[Last Chance]

@JohnJohn12For my "Magnificent Octopus" I have several thousand footnotes (535,000 words and counting). If you treat them as endnotes, then they can be ported over in one go. The only problem, as said previously, is that APub does not port over the footnote numbers embedded in the text.

[Pyanepsion]

@JohnJohn12,

This can be done more or less well by hand. 

Endnotes (e.g. the book or chapter) can be a convenient way to publish notes very quickly.

Footnotes to a zone (e.g. a page) require the creation of a text frame (yellow) which is either superimposed on the bottom text frame of the normal body of the text (green) and the text is pushed out. You can also build a footnote area for footnotes (yellow) just below the normal text frame (green).

[pfbt]

@JohnJohn12 If you're on a Mac, I can heartily recommend Mellel for thesis writing. Affordable, rock solid, works wonderfully with Bookends (and, I believe, Endnotes). I did my PhD thesis in it. Bit of a learning curve, but well worth the effort until Affinity offers a viable alternative.

[fde101]

On 5/23/2022 at 9:10 AM, pfbt said:

@JohnJohn12 If you're on a Mac, I can heartily recommend Mellel for thesis writing. Affordable, rock solid, works wonderfully with Bookends (and, I believe, Endnotes). I did my PhD thesis in it. Bit of a learning curve, but well worth the effort until Affinity offers a viable alternative.

Mellel is a great word processor for this type of thing, but is not a page layout app.  Right now to avoid the subscription model and get footnote/endnote support in a layout app you are basically looking at QuarkXPress or possibly one of a few lesser-known or overall less capable products.  Most of the less expensive products I have looked at do not support them.

Scribus is apparently adding them but they are not in a stable release yet.

There is also LaTeX, of course - a bit different to work with but it can produce excellent results once you wrap your head around it.

[Pedrober]

QXP support for footnotes is acceptable but not very good. See the QXP facebook threads.

[fde101]

12 minutes ago, Pedrober said:

QXP support for footnotes is acceptable but not very good. See the QXP facebook threads.

Regardless, if you don't want to pay the Adobe tax, there are few other options right now.

Personally if i had to create a formal or even semi-formal document such as a thesis which was long enough to have even 200 footnotes I wouldn't consider using anything other than LaTeX, but I know that way of working is not for everyone.

[pfbt]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

Mellel is a great word processor for this type of thing, but is not a page layout app.  Right now to avoid the subscription model and get footnote/endnote support in a layout app you are basically looking at QuarkXPress or possibly one of a few lesser-known or overall less capable products.  Most of the less expensive products I have looked at do not support them.

Scribus is apparently adding them but they are not in a stable release yet.

There is also LaTeX, of course - a bit different to work with but it can produce excellent results once you wrap your head around it.

That's true in principle. However, I had a number of diagrams in my thesis and was happy that I could place them where I wanted. Can also do text wrap around, etc. Yes, it's not as flexible as Aff. Pub. where I can put the diagram virtually anywhere and pin it (or put it inline), but I was more than happy with the layout and placing of text. It's brilliant with headings and table of content (although there is one quirky bit with that). If I had to do another thesis, Mellel would be my first choice ... until Aff. Pub. gets footnotes, endnotes and proper cross-referencing (which Mellel is stunning at).  The integration with Bookends is marvellous.

[ScKate]

Desperately seeking end notes and footnotes.

[PaoloT]

5 hours ago, fde101 said:

I wouldn't consider using anything other than LaTeX

I'm recurrently tempted by LaTeX. But then, every book I see made with it smells of school textbook. So, I end up declining.

Paolo

 

[Pedrober]

Currently, the only solution in Apub would be to flow the text of footnotes through a series of frames at the bottom of the pages. Time consuming solution, of course.

[pfbt]

20 hours ago, PaoloT said:

I'm recurrently tempted by LaTeX. But then, every book I see made with it smells of school textbook. So, I end up declining.

Paolo

 

I've started learning LaTex as an interim step while waiting (years!) for Serif to provide footnotes, endnotes and proper cross-referencing (if they ever do).

[Archangel]

On 12/16/2020 at 6:14 PM, Patrick Connor said:

This is is simply an incorrect understanding. The same team who wrote PagePlus are writing Affinity Publisher. These programmers can access the legacy code (if desired), but there is no need, they wrote it and know how they wrote it. Legacy code and the Affinity code is not shared as the implementation and architecture are not similar. This feature needs writing using the current language spec and using the current OS independent architecture and algorithms. Code like this is not simply plug and play

True. Algorithms my travel and improve between architectures, but code will not. At least not easily.

[Pyanepsion]

On 5/26/2022 at 1:25 PM, pfbt said:

I started to learn while waiting for Serif to provide appropriate […] cross-reference notes.

Hello, @pfbt ,

What do cross-reference notes need to be truly appropriate?

(For those wondering what it is, here is what is currently being done, see this video:)

https://affinity.serif.com/tutorials/publisher/desktop/video/337458844/

[Igor23]

This would be an amazing feature ) Hopefully they add it in 2.0! AfPub would really become quite powerful

[Pyanepsion]

1 hour ago, Igor23 said:

This would be an amazing feature ) Hopefully they add it in 2.0! AfPub would really become quite powerful

😊Uh! About the cross-reference notes ? This video shows what has been going on for quite some time.

[vlimm]

+1

Yes, please! Without this functionality, it's infeasible for me to use Affinity Publisher. 

As well as supporting natively-created endnotes, if you could also include functionality to import from Word, this would be wonderful. But even just a basic endnote construct in Affinity would be sufficient. I'd be willing to do the work to manually add them in Affinity, as long as each entry remained linked with its back matter content for easy navigation.

I love your software, and was so sad to realize that it's infeasible to use it because of this gap in functionality.

[LenKagelmacher]

As with the majority of writers, I prepare my manuscript in MS Word, using both Mac and Windows versions. My current book requires a great deal of research, thus many hundreds of footnotes. We've chosen to record the notes as footnotes to keep them with the relevant text while writing, but will convert to endnotes when the manuscript is complete. Like most, I'm anxiously awaiting native support for foot/endnotes in AfPub, but have found what looks to be a nice workaround in NoteStripper by editorium.com.

NoteStripper is a Word macro that allows me to strip the notes (footnotes and/or endnotes) and place them at the end of the Word document. The main text retains the (unlinked) superscripts that relate to the numbered notes. I can then have two documents: one with the main text and the superscripted references to the endnotes; the other the list of numbered notes. Both documents retain their original formatting, and can be placed in AfPub separately (unlinked).

I did a search in this forum for NoteStripper and for emporium.com, but found only one reference to the latter, seemingly not related to the footnotes issue. Hopefully, this adds a bit of value to the discussion. If not, then just "Hi! I'm Len. Happy to make my first post!"

Edited June 20, 2022 by LenKagelmacher

[Trevor A]

Len

Welcome, and thank you for the tip!

Once Affinity Publisher offers support for footnotes and endnotes, it will be a great program, as in all other respects it is excellent and powerful.

Trevor

[meyer.wil]

On 5/25/2022 at 10:29 AM, PaoloT said:

I'm recurrently tempted by LaTeX. But then, every book I see made with it smells of school textbook. So, I end up declining.

Paolo

 

I just published a 480 page technical book using LaTeX, and the kaobook template. It was not without challenges, but once I learned the way to handle things, I was able to obtain a very nice result. And it does not look like a textbook. Early on, that was a common complaint, as the handling of styles is intended to make spontaneous alterations difficult, in the interest of a coherent design. You need to visit ctan.org, and also search for templates. There is also abundant peer support available.

I would really like to use Affinity Publisher, but I need footnotes, and in this book I also used marginnotes.

[PaoloT]

57 minutes ago, meyer.wil said:

You need to visit ctan.org

Thank you for the hint. But – alas! – the website itself seems to come out of the Nineties!

Paolo

 

[fde101]

8 hours ago, PaoloT said:

the website itself seems to come out of the Nineties!

Most people access web sites using the TCP/IP protocols, which were developed in the 70's, so a web site from the 90's is actually quite recent considering what you are going through in order to access it.

 

9 hours ago, meyer.wil said:

I just published a 480 page technical book using LaTeX

Good choice.

 

On 6/20/2022 at 12:40 PM, Trevor A said:

Once Affinity Publisher offers support for footnotes and endnotes, it will be a great program

It is already a great program, just one which is not currently well-suited to your particular use case.

 

On 6/20/2022 at 12:40 PM, Trevor A said:

as in all other respects it is excellent and powerful

Not in *all* other respects - no support for RTL or vertical languages, no global layers, questionable practices regarding the handling of global and spot colors, inadequate cross-reference support, virtually no interactive features (other than hyperlinks), no support for spreads of more than two pages, no support for custom slug areas (just a few pre-defined things that can be turned on or off), no support for variable or color fonts, ... ... ...

 

Some users are much more heavily impacted by one or more of those things than by the lack of footnotes and endnotes.

[PaoloT]

14 hours ago, fde101 said:

Most people access web sites using the TCP/IP protocols, which were developed in the 70's, so a web site from the 90's is actually quite recent considering what you are going through in order to access it.

During the Nineties there were people vigorously defending that real men didn't need icons. I feel like that web site may have been developed by someone who was convinced of it. I would hesitate to consider that as part of the same modern communication world that came after PageMaker.

Paolo

 

[fde101]

14 hours ago, PaoloT said:

real men didn't need icons.

Wait, you mean... they do?!?!?!?

😇

 

I just pulled up the CTAN site and believe it or not they seem to be using a lot more icons than I remember them using last time I visited it.  Given the nature of the site (and of TeX itself) the site seems reasonably appropriate to me.

The TeX system can still be used quite effectively on a lot of older computer platforms which might not handle "modern" web browser standards particularly well, so keeping the site reasonably simple for such systems to parse may very well factor into the design...

[kfriis]

On 8/31/2018 at 2:38 PM, garrettm30 said:

Are footnotes and endnotes currently possible (besides manually creating them, of course)? I haven't found them so far.

If not, this is a feature that I think would be widely used. I suspect it may take some time to get right if it is not yet under development, so I would understand if it is not a day-1 feature.

Woaaa!!

Soon four years and counting!

I remember the early days of UK home computers and PC clones. The UK was leading for a few years, then… suddenly… fell off a cliff due to lack of innovations and customer support. They insisted on being the best; even while the world decided otherwise.

Now, is Affinity aiming at repeating this old sad state of affairs?

Regards

P.S. I have practically stopped using designer (nice app, but integrates rather badly with other software). Photo is relegated to handling old material. I’ve returned to using Lightroom Classic and Photoshop again. And as far as Publisher goes, the still lacking support for docx material import (including styles), lack of foot/endnotes support and especially no real export to ePub usage (especially galling, now that Amazon/Kindle seems to be about to make peace with the format). I’ve even used Word as a Publisher replacement in one recent case, since Publisher seems to have become a dead end, and word at least is supported by most serious environments - still!

It’s not a case of pricing. It’s a simple case of lack of even the most basic features, supported in most serious environments. Nearing four years of non-solution of significant omissions to the product feature list is rather telling in my view.

Your mileage may vary, but all my licenses for iPad, Windows and Mac has fallen out of use the last 12-18 months. Maybe a secondary machine will be relegated to supporting legacy solutions, like Affinity Designer, Photo and especially Publisher.

It all looked so enticing many years ago, and look now on all the good will squandered by inaction or persisting non-solutions to relatively basic needs.

 

[Pyanepsion]

Hello, @kfriis,

The first version was released on 19 June 2019. It was already quite exciting despite some shortcomings, and it won an award. Since then, every few weeks, a new update brings its share of improvements on the existing features and from time to time we even find new functions.

Except for the long-awaited footnotes, which are the subject of this discussion, you just need to open the Word text to import it. Some defects in the Word file are even corrected. That said, whether it’s QuarkXPress or Indesign, good DTP is about taking all the raw text from Words and then rebuilding the styles if you want to get a professional job.

The EPUB format has nothing to do with the format of a printed book. The structure of the files has nothing to do with it, hence the disasters of the extensions of some DTP software that have tried it. This format can only be obtained with really specific software. Just select all the text from Publisher and paste it into one of these specialized programs.