I’ve been answering the question of “can I make endnotes in InDesign” for years now, and the answer is always “sorry”! So I was so pleased to see this wonderful little workaround written up by Bob Bringhurst, the lead docs guy on the InDesign team. To give credit where it’s due, he based this on a comment by Peter Gold, who humbly noted on the adobe forums, ” Shucks, folks. This is just an old FrameMaker technique.”
It’s a very simple and elegant solution: First, type each endnote in at the end of the document and set it to a paragraph style that includes automatic numbering. Then — on the document page, where you want the end note reference number — insert a cross-reference to that paragraph. Set the Format pop-up menu to Paragraph Number, so that the cross-reference just grabs the auto-number.
But yes, the Cross References panel is a new feature in CS4…
Now if we can just get the MS Word import filter to generate those automatically when you place the document!
Thanks, Bob and Peter!
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on April 1, 2009
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