I’m working on a mss. that is a collection of letters; each letter has one or more footnotes of explanatory historical detail. Having worked through all 1,100 notes adding the detail and source, I belatedly realized I should have tagged each footnote with the number of the source letter, #001-#428.
I’ve been laboriously doing so by scrolling through the entire mss., clicking on each footnote as I encounter it, and adding the letter’s number in each one. But since I’d written those numbers down on a printed copy of the footnotes from the compilation, I already know each letter’s number and don’t need to verify it in the mss itself.
Is there a way to view all existing footnotes in one long file, and to have whatever changes I make to each note ‘stick’ in the current file of the mss?
Thanks, Kewms, I should have been more clear: I’m skipping from note to note in the Inspector sidebar already. There’s just a click-click lag to activate the note, place the cursor, type, and then click-click on the next note. It would be swell to have the notes in one long file I could work in outside the mss., but perhaps that’s only possible after the mss. has been compiled. And even if I did so, would the edits in the notes translate backward into the mss? Perhaps not.
There are two ways you could go about making this task more efficient:
Inspector footnotes
If it is the mechanical process of clicking about and so forth that is slowing you down, then consider using the keyboard instead:
Enter: toggle editing on and off. Note this is the Enter key, not the Return key. On a full keyboard that will be the one in the num-key area, and on a laptop or compact keyboard it will be FnReturn.
↑/↓ to switch between notes.
And of course standard arrow key navigation around selections applies. When you toggle editing on, the entirety of the note will be selected. In a selection ← moves the cursor to the beginning of it, and → moves to the end of it.
Once you get that worked into your muscle memory you should be able to fly through the list a lot more quickly than with the mouse. And of course you might find a mix of mouse and keyboard is most efficient—particularly if the notes that need to be edited are non-linear.
A nice thing about the Enter key is that (for right-handers anyway), it’s right under your thumb without having to leave the mouse. That’s an old ergonomic hack that Macs have used for decades, and why this specific Enter key often has special abilities, like confirming dialogue boxes.
Inline footnotes
As noted, there are two ways of working with footnotes. If you aren’t already using inline footnotes for a specific purpose (like a separate endnote stream), then getting your notation into the main editor will of course solve a lot of mechanical issues because now you’re just editing text normally.
With this approach you will most likely want to use the Edit ▸ Find ▸ Find by Formatting... tool, switched to “Inline Footnote” in the top dropdown. Once you’ve got that set, you can close the panel, and use the shortcuts for next/previous formatting hits, which you’ll find listed at the bottom of that same submenu. You will note that doing so selects the entire inline footnote, so the tip above on selection navigation still applies.