Right John!
As far as I can understand the complexity is certainly high, otherwise we would already have had them. Footnotes space inside one or more music frames is a completely new object to handle, with the condition to stay near its link, with variable dimension and various contents.
Here (well, Dante) we say “da far tremare le vene e i polsi”! Crusca
But Dorico has a great team!
@Alberto_Maria The Dorico team is fantastic, but in this case, I am afraid that one must Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate (Dante)
Great John, and quite appropriate!
In fact I normally use all the complex notes at the end of the scores…
Your quotation is exact (Treccani), even if here often it’s quoted differently:
an enigmatic vowel substitution!
I’m not sure I’d ever abandon all hope where the Dorico team is concerned, but certainly there are those cases in which one’s virtuous patience develops more stamina. 
It’s very possible and quite easy to generate footnotes, but there are significant limitations.
In engrave mode, in frame mode, move up the bottom border of the music frame and create a text frame at the bottom of the page.
If you want to use the same text on multiple parts, use the ‘other information’ token in the project or flow information, type your text there, and reference the token in the text frames on each part.
However, that can be done just for one footnote per flow. For multiple footnotes per flow, you can use other tokens, but it quickly gets messy. So that’s a limitation.
The current downside is that there is no link between the text frame and the music frame. So if the music moves to another page, the text will stay on the original page. So using this technique is only viable once the music is finalised.
I have used this approach successfully myself, but of course, proper support would be better.
It would also be possible to include musical examples by creating a music frame not linked to the main frame chain of the flow.
I don’t want to take any credit for that, @Alberto_Maria and am embarrassed to say that my Italian is close to nil, despite my surname: I just swiped it from internet.
End notes are now most common in urtext editions. I have broken with this newer tradition and returning to the older one (like the Bischoff editions of Bach) to try to get players to actually read the notes.
@RichardTownsend That pretty much describes what I do in both Finale and Dorico. I’m now using graphic slices for the examples, as was suggested to me in this forum. It works well. I have a template file with footnote-numbered 1), 2,) 3) etc. slots for the examples to go into.
Encountering this statement here (especially given the large number of “this should be easy…” posts that have flowed into the forum since Aug. 26, 2024) put me in mind of an analogy with working in Dorico.
I’m in the midst of a small writing project — a combination of program notes and a pre-performance talk — which I’m doing as only my second project in the software Scrivener. I’ve been meaning to get to know it better, and a small project seemed like a good way to go.
With its nearly 1,000-page manual and vast and sophisticated array of features that mirror in some ways the five modes of Dorico, it seems like a much better environment to compare with learning Dorico than a more straightforward word processor (though I fully realize that many of those have bloated to the point of steep learning curves). I confess, I have not done anywhere near the work I should have to study it first ( 
), so many things seem mysterious and confusing. And I know I’m just scratching the surface of what it can do and how best to do it.
I made the choice and the project is due soon, so I’ll continue to kluge it together this way (since the required output is actually just some raw text sent to someone else), but I would “hit the woodshed” hard if I were ever to use it for a serious writing project like a book!
To the topic of this thread, I can’t speak to what, if any, extra programming challenges the implementation of footnotes placed on the Scrivener team because of everything else that it can do, but I imagine — echoing @John_Ruggero — that it might be even less trivial than it is in MS Word, et al.
Yes!!
… I loathe and despise end-notes! (FWIW ) Two bookmarks, endless flipping back-and-forth,* lost reading flow* in regaining one’s original spot, increased risk of paper cuts… 
I think your instinct is good, John. For my money, the impact on layout and extra effort involved seem worth it in drawing the performer in to engagement with the footnotes.
It just did, @benwiggy …it just did.
Hey, I didn’t know one could do hidden “foot notes” in this forum or whatever you call that!
I like the challenge of adding all the information in footnotes while at the same time not letting the page turns suffer in any way. So far, it’s always worked, although occasionally some of the footnotes run on to the following facing page, and horrors (but fortunately very rarely), on to a following spread.
It called “Hide Details,” found by clicking on the gear icon. I (and others, I know) love it. I described it to another user a month or two ago:
@judddanby One learns a thing or two (or three) every day here!
Indeed!!
In adding my voice to the chorus requesting footnotes, I’d make these suggestions. Make it work within Dorico’s existing approach of text frames via a “footnote wizard” that interrogates the user and inserts and sizes text frames automatically where needed. It would allow the user to enter either exact text or a footnote token (maybe up to 128 per project; would want them capble of use in multiple flows). It would require a choice: “attach” to a measure or note and place the footnote’s text frame on whichever page(s) the measure/note appears; or specify which pages (by page number or possibly by measure range) show the footnote — similar perhaps to Finale’s clear and useful Frame Attributes menu with drop downs for page or measure choice. It would size the text frame, again with options: (1) to hug the bottom margin; (2) to start at a specified point above the bottom margin; (3) to start below the bottom staff of the page. It would offer a choice of left-, center-, or right-aligned (defaulting to left). And perhaps it could allow a choice of one, two, or three lines in height, defined by the size of the text in a new paragraph style for footnotes. So if you wanted something like a product number at the bottom of every page, you could have that, with the possibility of a page-specific footnote above that. I believe everything I have outlined is possible in the existing software by adding multiple text frames, ideally in the relevant master pages. So the final option would be to save either as page override or as master page edit. Ideally, the relevant text frames would move as music is revised, re-flowed, re-casted off, etc. But since that’s not how text frames now work, the wizard might need a button to update their positioning if they end up in the wrong place after making changes. I realize for a simple footnote or two, adding text and moving it to a measure at the bottom is a fast workaround. But to take advantage of Dorico’s flexibility and architecture, especially in bigger projects, the text frame approach would make more sense if it were not so cumbersome. Another workaround is using another program to add text to PDFs when everything is done. That’s one I’ve tried and it works well in some cases. But we should expect Steinberg to develop an intuitive way to handle footnotes within Dorico.
The program already is capable of running footers for page number, code numbers, and the like. No need to try to shoehorn that into a footnote routine.
Right. This is not about footers that appear on multiple pages, but footnotes that correspond to a particular point in the music and should move to the correct page as music and/or layout are revised, parts formatted, etc.
I would find what you describe in the earlier post to be very helpful and second the requests. (You might divide that post up into several paragraphs for easier reading.) I often make layout changes that affect the footnotes and it would be great if they adapted. Also automatic updating of the footnote numbers as footnotes are added or subtracted.
I have one other request. The handles are on top of each other when a text and music frame are contiguous, so it is hard to move the one that one wants to move. It would be better if the middle handle of the text frame were offset.
Rather than offsetting, it would be nice if moving a handle respected which frame is currently selected. In your picture above, the text frame is selected, so I would expect that clicking on and moving the circled handles would affect the text frame – which is not what happens.
I work around this by always using arrows to select the handle and Opt-arrow to move it. Foolproof way to make sure adjustments are predictable.
