On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>
> Hi Martin,
>
> I would probably prefer if the endnotes and footnotes share as much
> code as possible for the sake of future maintanance.
>
I would too but I'd very much like to get Pat Lam's opinion before
launching into this. He might even want to do the work :-)
> > Also we have be care about
> > deleting references. It is quite common to have multiple references to
> > the same end note. Do we want to maintaina reference count on the
> > endnote strux and delete when it drops to zero? (we can do this via
> > attribute/value pair). We might also want to delete the original
> > reference which would delete the EndNote text unless we put in special
> > purpose code in the piecetable..
>
> The way multiple references are handled in Word is by using
> NOTEREF field: you bookmark the primary reference, and then
> when you want to refer to the same note again, you insert a field
> {NOTEREF "my_bookmark"}. This works for both footnotes and
> endnotes, and together with the PAGEREF field in case of footnotes
> it is rather powerful. The bigest downside is that if you delete the
> note or the reference bookmark, all the other references turn into
> message "Error: bookmark not defined!"; tracking and fixing it
> through a 250 page manuscript is a minor nightmare.
>
He He. I was just think of a rather easy solution to this for us. (Just
scan the doc for fields with identical footnote-id's and delete them
inside a undo GLOB). It appears MS just bails out :-)
> It would be invaluable if we could devise of mechanism that would
> allow to insert multiple references to both endnotes and footnotes,
> and warn you if you try to delete a primary reference which has
> secondary references attached to it.
>
We could use the refcounting attribute idea to warn or just remove them
upon deleting the footnote/endnote anchor.
> If we go down this road, the format of the secondary references
> should be customisable so that the reference could appear either as
> the note number or the number of the page on which the primary
> reference is, so that you could easily create things likel 'see note {3}
> on page {1}'.
>
Yep. We could do this fancy stuff quite easily. Just a new type of type
of field with two parameters. The footnote-id and the type of reference
required. These would just be two attributes. The automatically
updating feilds framework we put together would simply look up the
footnote via it's footnote-id attribute and decide what value to give it
via a new attribute (say footnote-type with values
"pos_in_doc","page_number", "pos_on_page" etc...)
Cheers
Martin
