special characters and footnotes

[Kalavinka@adobeforums.com]

Dominic,

On this we can agree: "make your decision on what will be the best for you today."

Clearly _not_ Ventura. Right?

Since Ventura as we have it now _won't_ either handle Unicode or Asian double-byte languages (Chinese-Japanese). Right?

And to get to the crux: You do or do not successfully produce finished book layouts incorporating lots of footnotes in ID?

(Previous posts have led me to believe you've found tolerable workarounds for this. No?)

Mitra

PS: Sorry if I poked a sacred cow in dismissing Corel, but their old CEO ruined an old favorite (WordPerfect), robbed me repeatedly on multiple products (long on effusively-exaggerated advertising for trashy bug-city software). Thus it's hard for me to take that company very seriously again until I see rock-solid bug-free programs in something besides the only thing they ever did right (Draw).

[Dominic_Hurley@adobeforums.com]

Sorry if I poked a sacred cow in dismissing Corel.

Not at all. I have no great love for Corel at all, but I do have a lot of time for Ventura. For me, it offers excellent typographic control and long-document features, along with unparalleled style sheet features. For example, the other day I wanted to change a setting that lives a level below a tab in the paragraph styles. (It was actually an alternate font size, that can be used for app-generated small caps but which I was using in conjunction with character tags to allow for customisable spaces.) In FM, I would have to do this sort of thing one style at a time. In Ventura, I selected all the relevant styles in the navigator - about 100+ styles - and changed the property once for them all. I love that.

As for "clearly not Ventura". It depends. Just as Tim would have to employ a workround in ID for footnotes, he would have to employ a workround in Ventura or FM for Unicode fonts (There is an enhancement to Charles Hedrick's OT utility that a Ventura user has made available to let people breakout the codepages they want from OT fonts. Though I'm not familiar with the demands of Japanese, which may mean I'm missing something here.) Tim may actually find FM or Ventura more appropriate than ID; he may not.

As for the crux, no, I prefer to use Ventura for my footnote-heavy books. I do keep current on the best way to achieve the same in ID, because I'm hoping that ID will eventually take on more long-document features and when and if it does I want to be able to migrate easily and quickly, but it still has a long way to go before I will move that workflow over. Yes, I could do them in ID, but for me that would be a retrograde step at present.

[Timothy_Takemoto@adobeforums.com]

No Asian Languages, no go. So I guess I am stuck with IDCS.

I am so stupid that I don't know why I don't stay with Word, if it were not for the REALLY annoying way that images jump around the place. I remembered. I must leave Word hell.

DPT has a long way to come.

There are also four script/plugin ways of achieving some measure of footnote support

Guy's relying on importing from a cleaned up Word document
<http://www.guyverville.com/html/scripts.php>
I have not tried this since it looks too complicated.

Peter's script earlier on this thread which increments superscripts.

Virginia Systems InFnote ($195)
<http://www.virginiasystems.com/products.html>
The demo (5 footnotes) is free to download. A footnote/endnote auto-numbering and auto-ordering tool. Seems very intolerant of error so i am loath to fork out this much for something this basic.

Polish Site by a kind man called Robin that
<http://www.suwalski.pl/dtp/>
with another word footnote import tool only for INCS 2.02 at the time of writing. He was kind enought to send me an English "read me" but his script (installed via an active .exe file) did not work with my IDCS.

Places where one day there may be footnote scripts
Script collection for ID2 and 3 in JAPANESE (yeah)
<http://www007.upp.so-net.ne.jp/mizusina/downloard_ID.htm>
<http://www.dd.iij4u.or.jp/~xyz/inDesign10/indesign.html>
Scripts for ID 2 in English
<http://www.nickhodge.com/mne.php?msid=47>

Jonathan G. Bressel <bressel at sefer.org> 's NoteMaker of page maker may be updated?
<http://www.makingpages.org/pagemaker/tips/footnote.html>

I think I will also consider moving to open source and laTEX. I had a go with the non Asian language version GUI version and it was good. But I did not find out how to get the Asian language version going.
<http://www.mi.uib.no/~hansfn/tex/advocacydft.pdf>

[Dominic_Hurley@adobeforums.com]

I have tried the Virginia Systems plugin and basically you have to recreate all your foonotes (it's a marker and and cross reference system). It's not very practicable for anyone needing to do a lot of footnotes.

Guy's scripts are very good (I have used elements of his Word macro in mine), and are worth perservering with, both because they're actually not that complicated and because you're going to have to do what they do anyway.

There have been some indications that ID might get footnote support in the future, so who knows? But given that FM's footnotes are not that great, maybe that won't be a good thing!

PS. How is the Polish plugin supposed to work? Does it automate footnote placement or just create linked frames and update numbers?

[Timothy_Takemoto@adobeforums.com]

Hmm... Perhaps I should have another go with GUY's scripts. I don't like the idea of using Word to create the footnotes because I moved away from Word because I don't like its footnotes (one to a line). But IDCS is worse!

I think that Adobe must realise the depth of users anguish (if you search for indesign and footnotes then there are loads of hits bewailing the absence of this feature) so I guess they will be doing something about it.

The Polish plugin basically just creates linked frames and updates numbers. But it is more powerful, in that it will accept numbered footnotes (as endnotes) imported from MS Word and then place them out on the appropriate pages for you. It can also renumber footnotes -it searches for numbers in the main story and matches them with paragraphs in the footnote story - and add a bar before or at the top of the footnote frames. Robin, the creator, is planning to add a footnote insertion wizard in the next version, apparently.

The biggest problem is that it does not seem to work with my Japanese Windows, alas.

Sorry, I don't mean to endorse the Tex advocacy document. ButI do think that open source is the future. For example there is a good chance that I will never buy another version of windows or office again (unless someone buys them for me) because Linux and OOo have caught up to a level of usability that I am satisfied with. However, I agree, it was my impression that Tex has a while to go, but I am routing for them.

Tim

[Dominic_Hurley@adobeforums.com]

I don't like the idea of using Word to create the footnotes because I moved away from Word because I don't like its footnotes (one to a line).

I think you're missing the point - you use Word just to insert the footnotes; how they look there is of no relevance. All that formatting is done in ID. (Though I must admit I do have a lot of trouble convincing people that ugly formatting in Word can be ignored because it won't be reproduced in the final document.) All that Guy's script does is tag those notes appropriately to make importing into ID easier. Then you format to what you want.

Robin's script sounds pretty much the same as Guy's except for the automation of footnotes to pages. I must e-mail him for a readme.

Sorry, I don't mean to endorse the Tex advocacy document.

No, I should apologise for giving you that impression. I didn't mean to say you were endorsing the document, just pointing out to anyone who cared to listen that it is not unbiased.

[Tony_Stuart@adobeforums.com]

Ventura is a very good product (I find it much better than ID for most of my purposes), and even if it is never upgraded again it will still be my product of choice for (I imagine) some years until ID catches up.

Ditto, Dominic. I hammered Adobe with a long list of long-standing Ventura features as candidates for inclusion in ID3 but they obviously went straight through to the keeper (North Americans: please read this as 'straight through to the catcher'). Adobe must have exhausted cherry-picking QuarkXPress by now and should now shift its focus to Ventura and FrameMaker.

I also am optimistic that there will be a Ventura 11 with Unicode and other facilities.

By a stroke of luck I have a university client that keeps me very busy in Ventura doing mono pubs written in English (or an approximation thereof) with very few footnotes, easily handled manually or converted to endnotes. But if I am forced to use to handle copious footnotes (even in Ventura) I will definitely consider the rolling frame workaround listed here. Well done, guys. Now why didn't I think of that ...

[Timothy_Takemoto@adobeforums.com]

I have gone back to using MS Word! Because having no footnotes is just too much for me. How can anyone *write* anything other than a poster or magazine using InDesign?

I think that the answer is that InDesign is NOT for *writers* but only for layout editors, graphic designers and those that work in the publishing field. Once you have the finished manuscript then cool, use InDesign, it will look great. But don't think that you are going to be able to write, that is to say *compose,* a footnoted document using InDesign.

Or at least I was too dumb to be able to do it.

I look forward to Ventura 11 with Unicode.

Tim

[JohnO@adobeforums.com]

> I think that the answer is that InDesign is NOT for *writers*

I agree with you, but for slightly different reasons. Word is outstanding
for composing new text, it has the autocorrect, on-the-fly spelling and
grammar (which *can* be useful) as well as far superior document navigation
and view controls. For writing, Word beats every layout app by a mile. But
ID isn't (obviously) made for doing the same thing.

-John O

[Dominic_Hurley@adobeforums.com]

Absolutely ID is not for writing long documents. I think you should always use the best product for the job at hand, and a word processor is usually the best tool for composing text (though I'd rather use FrameMaker than Word). Of course, there's also InCopy, though that doesn't do footnotes either. The real problem comes when you need to edit footnoted text after it has been laid out in a DTP app. That's when ID falls down.

[pierre_kaher@adobeforums.com]

I have an AppleScript method to do this (numbering and placing footnotes) that I am about to post in the appropriate forum.
Perhaps you could try and translate it.

Regards.

[Timothy_Takemoto@adobeforums.com]

I guess that this would mean having an Apple Mac computer? I am still part of the empire.

[Robin_robiNET@adobeforums.com]

Hi

I have script for footnotes ... not full-automat, but very usefull - one_hand_editing ...

[url]www.suwalski.pl/dtp[/url] <http://www.suwalski.pl/dtp>

robin