I am using InDesign 2 on Windows 2000. My main work is book publishing, including automatically generated footnotes. Is there a function in InDesign to do this? When I import my texts written in Word 2000, all footnotes are penned at the end of the file, but not on the respective page where they should appear. The help file does not offer any entry on footnotes.
Thanks for help. Jochen Weiss
Jochen,
You're not going to be helped in this regard even by upgrading to IDCS. Adobe is still a relatively anti-intellectual organization, a hand-maiden of pop culture which has no particular appreciation of the book layout needs of intellectuals or their ilk. In short: No. ID doesn't do footnotes unless you want to create them yourself.
If you don't need Unicode or the advance features of ID, you can go with Framemaker, a product which Adobe is now backing away from and probably won't upgrade again in any significant way. (And one which apparently doesn't do a very inspired job of dealing with footnotes, anyway.)
(Do a search on this forum. You'll see many posts about laborious footnote work-arounds and half-baked plug-ins that don't really serve the needs of heavily-annotated manuscripts.)
Mitra
Kalavinka Press
Hello, Mitra,
Thanks for your comprehensive answer. Doesn't look very encouraging. I finally thought to have found the ideal program for our publishing purposes, and now that…
Do you have any alternative to ID for such kind of publishing work? I mean, footnotes, variable headers, index, automatic chapter generating, etc.
Thanks, Jochen
Do you have any alternative to ID for such kind of publishing work? I
mean, footnotes, variable headers, index, automatic chapter generating,
etc.
Microsoft Word
WordPerfect
FrameMaker or Ventura may be more useful to you. I just posted a brief overview of the two in the PM forum in answer to a similar question. Click here. </cgi-bin/webx?13@@no-spam> I disagree with Stu in that I certainly don't think you should use a word processor for publishing work; there are apps out there (or plugins, if that's the way you want to go) that can do the job.
My answer was partly tongue-in-cheek. Although if you can create a workflow based on word processor layout that gets the job done, why not? Lots of books have very minimal layout needs and should be well within the capabilties of WordPerfect or MS Word. Output to a PS file, distill that, and impose away.
Well, a book with "footnotes, variable headers, index, ... etc" is likely to have more than minimal layout needs. And even a book with a very simple layout (eg, a novel) deserves good typography, which word processors are not renowned for. Kerning, tracking, drop caps, OSFs, ligatures, true small caps, etc - all are easier to do in a true DTP app.
I must confess I get a little sensitive on this subject - it seems to me that software companies have long been of the view that those who want long-document features don't want or need good typographic control and vice versa. I work on books, not ads, and it annoys me that high-quality typography is effectively now seen by those companies to be the sole preserve of ads, newspapers, and magazines. I guess I just saw your post as another in that same line - ie, if you want long-document features, then you're not serious about quality and so go use a word processor!
What would it take to get Adobe to go this one extra step on what is a rather marvelous program: Augment IDCS with genuine annotation capabilities. Why can't they go the extra mile to make ID decent for books? I can't imagine that the book-publishing market wouldn't remunerate them adequately to make it worthwhile? ID has such decent sophistication on most other components, it sure would be nice to be able to get it all in one program.
As for using Word or, even worse, WordPerfect, for book layout. Pleeeeeeeeze! No, never. I know it was "tongue-in-cheek," but some poor novice is likely to take you seriously and then get stuck trying to recover hopelessly corrupted files which one may not even be able to open again at all. (I've had such experiences in both Word and WP.)
Mitra
Where there is a need, there must be a solution.
It's up to the market to convince Adobe that what Mitra says is absolutely true.
There is a decent market doing demanding book typography (IMO) and this market deserves something better, than word processors.
thanks
George
I guess I just saw your post as another in that same line - ie, if you
want long-document features, then you're not serious about quality and
so go use a word processor!
That was definitely not my intent. I completely agree that long-document features should be very high on the enhancement list, though I have little use for them myself, at least at present.
For an outfit or a designer doing books regularly - or any other document type that needs footnotes or lots of references - it probably makes sense to invest in one of the DTP programs that can automate those processs. For someone doing a one-time book project, it's probably not worth the investment or the significant learning curve, so they may find it easier to do the typography the hard way in the word processor and automate the footnotes and references that to get the easy typographical features and do the other stuff manually in InDesign.
I know we're going way OT here, but I've never had a Word file go
corrupt on me. Always make sure that you allow fast saves turned off in
Word.
You want corrupt files? Try Pagemaker.
Bob
For the last several months I've been teaching InDesign to folks who are FrameMaker users. The response to InDesign has been interesting. Many of these Frame users are initially very skeptical about InDesign but once they experience the user interface and the layout control available to them in InDesign they're hooked. Long-document features remain a stumbling block however. It's clear to me that our layout staff would prefer to use InDesign in most cases and we would very much like to see InDesign become the solution to all of our publishing needs. Perhaps only a decline in FrameMaker sales will convince Adobe that they should add these much-needed features to InDesign and give us the long-document and typesetting features so many of us are looking for in one application. I encourage users of this forum to "turn up the heat" on this topic and not relent until Adobe includes these features in InDesign.
Phil Redman
>Perhaps only a decline in FrameMaker sales will convince Adobe that they
should add these much-needed features to InDesign
I can't imagine the timing of news about PM's future and the addition of
special PM tools in ID were a coincidence. Maybe Adobe will add these
features to ID about the same time they decide to let FM out to pasture.
Maybe with ID 4?
-John O
I've never had a Word file go corrupt on me
Me neither
You want corrupt files? Try Pagemaker
Me too
I've had some 100 MB+ Word docs, and they're solid.
OTOH, PowerPoint files go bad all the time, but usually it's because Fast
Saves is on by default (even in Ppt 2003), and coupled with saving directly
to removeable drives is asking for trouble. If we all did that in Word, I
betcha we'd crash a few docs.
-John O
Hmm, never lost a PowerPoint file either. And I thought the default for
allow fast saves in Office 2003 was off by default.
Bob
If you've never had a Word file go corrupt on you, you've not had extensive experience with truly complex Word files involving specialized templates, extensive multi-level outlining, already generated TOCs, graphics, master docs, and subdocs, Asian text, exotic unicode ranges, etc. The architecture of Word is just too fragile for this.
The corroborating posts on this topic on the Web are numerous as I found when I kept having this happen at the high end of complexity and in fact this is what finally drove me into real book layout software. If you've only dealt with moderately complex files, even though very long, it's not surprising you haven't had the problem. Word can't handle truly complex layout. As for WordPerfect, don't even bother to mention it. As the Chinese would say: "You'll cause a guy to laugh his teeth out!" I've suffered so much grief at the hands of WP-mangled long-docs, it's hard not to curse just hearing the name.
As for the earlier post's reference to investing in some automated DTP solution to deal with multiple book-length jobs, I can't imagine what the heck program he is possibly talking about. Are these musings from a dream or something?
Mitra
As for Phil's:
"I encourage users of this forum to "turn up the heat" on this topic and not relent until Adobe includes these features in InDesign."
I'd like to second that. Isn't there some way we can get somebody in control of ID development to really wake up and smell the coffee on this?
ID is a such a first class program. If they'd go this extra "long-doc" mile, the advantages to Adobe should be obvious.
Mitra
Ok, this is a little off the corrupt files topic but I'd like to stop all the moaning and complaining about the footnotes if I may.
There is something I saw that may help. Check the link below.
<http://share.studio.adobe.com/axBrowseSubmit.asp?t=54>
Sorry if I pooped the party.
>And I thought the default for
> allow fast saves in Office 2003 was off by default.
Except for PowerPoint.
John O
It's off on mine.
Bob
Sorry if I pooped the party.
You didn't - that script was actually discussed (briefly) in the thread "special characters and footnotes" of a few days ago. I haven't tried it yet, but from the readme it seems to be a step more than other scripts that are about and does a bit more comparison between the footnotes and the footnote references. It's still a long way from being proper support, however.
Phil, did your FM users mention ID's modal style dialogues as being a problem? They rate as one of the major annoyances for me when it comes to ID's usability, as opposed to its features.
If you've never had a Word file go corrupt on you,
I haven't
you've not had extensive experience with truly complex Word files
Oh, but I have
involving specialized templates, extensive multi-level outlining, already
generated TOCs, graphics, master docs, and subdocs, Asian text, exotic
unicode ranges, etc.
Except for Asian text, all of those. Add in frames, multiple columns, hundreds of cross-references, footnotes, fields, thousands of section breaks, tables - and, oh, by the way over a network. Occasional crashes, yes - corrupted documents, never.
The architecture of Word is just too fragile for this.
Not in my experience. If you're having these kinds of problems, the first thing I'd check would be your network reliability.
We might agree to disagree here. I no longer have corruption problems with any of my many software programs and my system's rock-solid. Whether or not this is because I now refrain from trying to make Word or WP into book-layout programs will have to be a moot point. (But I didn't make up the fact of having found multiple corroborations for this "factoid" on Word-related sites.)
... but true enough, this was before upgrading from Office XP to Word 2003.
Mitra
Dominic,
I've taught this class to roughly 150 people and never had anyone mention it. Many participants are either Photoshop or Illustrator users so I think the similarity of the interface to those applications becomes the overriding factor. I find that our illustrators who have been using Adobe Illustrator for many years pick up InDesign faster than our FrameMaker users who have never used Photoshop or Illustrator.
We've got some work arounds for some of InDesign's more glaring omissions, such as table styles and running heads (we use scripts for these). The Frame users seem willing to accept these solutions as long as they work dependably.
Phil