Handling footnotes in an electronic manuscript
From: miriam.gold@[removed].edu
Date: 02 Sep 1993
Dear colleagues,
I am preparing a short work of historical nonfiction for possible electronic distribution. It has approximately 160 footnotes, most of them source citations, and I am not sure how best to handle them in an ASCII manuscript without making the text unpleasant to read.
Endnotes are easy for the producer, but poor for the reader when the note explains a term or gives a brief qualification. Footnotes are familiar on paper, but I do not see a reliable way to preserve them across terminals, word processors, and early Web display. Has anyone settled on a practical convention for scholarly work that will survive conversion?
Specific advice on numbering, placement, and what to do with longer citations would be very welcome.
Miriam Gold
From: carol.bennett@[removed].edu
Date: 04 Sep 1993
Miriam,
For plain electronic copy I have had the best results with bracketed note numbers in the text, like [12], and a numbered notes section at the end of each chapter. Chapter-end notes are less elegant than page footnotes, but they travel well across systems and avoid one very long notes file at the end of the book.
Keep the note call-outs in ordinary ASCII. Avoid superscript codes unless the publisher specifically asks for them. If the manuscript will later be typeset, the producer can convert the bracketed numbers more easily than he can repair inconsistent word processor footnote codes.
From: susan.vogel@[removed].net
Date: 06 Sep 1993
We ask writers to send three things when notes are involved: the clean text, a notes file or chapter-end notes, and a printed reference copy showing the intended relationship between text and notes. The paper copy is still very useful when a conversion goes wrong.
For longer citations, put the full bibliographic form in the notes rather than abbreviating too heavily. Electronic readers can search, but they cannot guess what has been omitted. If notes are explanatory rather than bibliographic, consider folding the most important ones into the text and reserving the notes for sources.
From: miriam.gold@[removed].edu
Date: 09 Sep 1993
Carol and Susan,
Thank you. Chapter-end notes with bracketed numbers sounds like the safest compromise. I had been trying to imitate the printed page too closely, which may be the wrong instinct at this stage.
I will also prepare a marked paper copy, since several of the notes are important to the argument and I do not want them lost in conversion.
Miriam