InDesign’s footnotes feature does not offer a way to continue the numbering of footnotes from one document to another. And if you regularly make long documents using the Book feature, this can be an annoying productivity killer.
For each document you have to manually open the Footnote Options and enter the start number (and update it any time footnotes were added or removed from previous documents in the book). Otherwise, the footnote numbering is going to start at 1 in each document.
But now there’s a script from Peter Kahrel to handle that task automatically. Just run the script with the book file open and footnote numbering will be updated in all documents. Even better: the documents don’t have to be open.
You can download the script and read more about it here.
Thanks, Peter!
This article was last modified on January 3, 2026
This article was first published on January 3, 2026
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