Blind Endnotes With Key Phrases

This script is part of the Notes collection. See the full collection here. For more information about using the scripts in this collection, see  Adding and Deleting Notes: Managing Cross-References.

Blind endnotes are endnotes without a note reference in the text, and with a page number for reference instead of a note number. InDesign’s endnotes can be converted to blind notes using a script, as described here.

A special case of blind endnotes are those that contain a textual reference to a key phrase in the text. In the following example sin nate es expliquo is the key phrase which occurs on p. 9; it is followed by a separator (here, two en-spaces) and the note itself:

This type of endnote layout is mentioned in the The Chicago Manual of Style(15th edn, p. 610 and p. 636, Fig. 16.12); it has come up in CreativePro’s forum a few times, see e.g. here and here.

Interestingly, while standard blind notes are easily handled using cross-references, blind notes with key phrases are more easily tackled as items in a table of contents. That may sound strange but it works very well. Below I’ll outline how to prepare the document and and run a script to convert notes to blind notes with key phrases. The document I use for this outline is attached below, it has all the settings in place.

General set-up

The general idea is to highlight the key phrases in a text with a text condition. The text condition is applied to the note reference as well. A script places a frame at each note reference, copies the highlighted text to the note frame, and moves the note text to the frame:

The note frames are set not to print, and the condition highlights aren’t printed by default, so neither appears in print or on screen when you select Preview mode.

Using a custom table-of-contents style the note section is generated and placed in a separate secition of the document; the table of contents will look as shown above.

There are several advantages to using a TOC: The notes are easy to manage because they are kept on the pages; it’s possible to include chapter headings in the note section; and it avoids InDesign’s endnotes.

Part of the note frame must be on the page. If it isn’t, the TOC won’t pick it up.

Document preparation

Unfortunately there are some problems with InDesign’s endnotes and the way they’re scripted. InDesign’s endnote scripting is in fact such that to convert endnotes to blind notes of the type discussed here it’s necessary first to convert them to footnotes. Fortunately that’s pretty straighforward.

Convert endnotes to footnotes

If the document’s notes are endnotes you’ll have to convert them to footnotes, which InDesign can do for you. Open the document and select ‘Convert footnotes and endnotes’ in the Type menu. This fires up InDesign’s note converter:

Select ‘Endnotes to Footnotes’ and click Convert. The notes will appear as footnotes. This may mess with the document’s layout but that’s just temporary, no need to worry about that.

During the conversion, InDesign manages to set the footnote paragraph text to Basic Paragraph, so you’ll have to reapply the note’s original paragraph style. You’ll have to set the separator anyway, so go the the Footnote Options window, set the paragraph style (here, Note), and the separator (^>^> for two en-spaces):

Create and apply a text condition

This is the only really manual part. First, create a text condition. Give it any name you want. Apply the condition to the phrases in the text that should be included in the blind notes as the key phrases; make sure to include the footnote reference as well. The footnote reference can be anywhere in the highlighted text: at the start, at the end, or anywhere in-between, but it must be highlighted.

Tip: You can look for footnote markers using InDesign’s Find/Change window: search for ^F and exclude footnotes from the search (to skip the footnote numbers in the notes)

Create a paragraph style for the notes in the notes section

The notes on the document pages keep the original endnote/footnote style. For the notes in the notes section (the crypto-TOC) a new style is needed. Create it (in the sample document it’s Note (notes section).

You could in principle use the note style, but it may be useful sometimes to set the notes on the document pages in smaller type to make them fit better, so it’s useful to have a separate paragraph style for the printed blind notes.

The key phrase should be probably in italics, so create a character style and set it as a nested style in the note paragraph style:

The first nested style applies [None] to the page number (which is printed before the note), then the key phrase character style is applied up to the first en-space.

The script creates the object style used for the note frames on the document pages.

Set up a table-of-contents style

Finally, set up a table-of-contents style. It’s called Notes in the sample file. Include any items you want; in the sample we included the chapter title. The note entries have their page numbers before the note.

With all this organised you’re ready to run the script. Save the document before you run the script because the footnotes will be deleted.

Run the script

Copy the script to InDesign’s Scripts folder in the usual way. Then click in any highlighted text and run the script from the Scripts panel. The endnotes appear next to their key phrases:

Create the blind notes: generate the table of contents

To create the blind endnotes, generate the table of contents in the usual way. The result is shown in one of the screenshots shown above.

Removing identical page numbers

If identical page numbers should be removed you’ll need a separate script; it’s attached below. Just run it from InDesign’s Scripts panel; it has no interface.

Version history

29 Mar. 2024: Added a script to do the conversion and rewrote the page.

June 2023: First posted.

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