Footnotes

This is less a feature request and more a musing of how footnotes might be implemented in a future release.

In my imagination, a master page would have a text frame set to the outside edge which would populate with footnotes like a conditional text token (e.g {@FootnoteOnPage1@} etc), populating only when a footnote (or more) is present on that page. Footnote text might be entered via a dialog menu similar to Project Info and those footnotes would then be applied as a staff or global item somehow, perhaps with a new tool in Write Mode.

Entirely conjecture, but I wonder how far off this might be from how footnotes are implemented in future.

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I feel sure that this has been dealt with already on this forum but agreed - I would implement it in the same way a text object is implemented but instead of showing up straight away it would be just referenced - perhaps in the same way a comment is (but with rich text) and then as you say a token can be used to display footnotes wherever you want them (or an automatic footnote can be created at the bottom of the music frame the page of which has the reference on).

Either way it doesn’t feel like a trivial thing to implement!

Specific page-numbered tokens wouldn’t be useful in Master Pages (as they would only work for one page).

I guess you’d have to have one Footnote token, which would display whatever footnotes happened to fall on that page at the time; and the footnotes themselves would be like Comments in the music.

Footnotes would also have to be a bit like ‘upside-down’ Flow headers: a text frame that would extend upwards from the bottom of the music frame.

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I had the same thought. The kicker with footnotes, though, is we would need the ability to add in images/snippets to describe playing techniques or alternate notation, etc., which complicates matters quite a bit.

While text-only footnotes will be a step in the right direction, ultimately they will be insufficient. I suspect we will need a footnote editing dialogue that will provide us comprehensive text styles editing along with margin and in-line image placement.

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What is the currently most practical way of adding text-only footnotes? In the score I’m engraving now the bassoon part contains some text expressions not found in the full score; I’d like to make a footnote about this in the full score where they first appear …

I do a bit of this. The easiest way is to add it as a text object in the part, then hide it in the full score.

In this example, I wanted to manipulate the text objects independently, so I hid the ones I didn’t want to display.

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Thank you very much!