Sections Stuff
New: Set the first sections of a book to use roman numerals.
Sections Stuff allows you to add and remove section markers throughout your InDesign document based on paragraph styles.
One main use for this script is to control footnotes. InDesign allows the user to restart footnotes numbering within a single story whenever the user has marked a certain page as a new section (via the pages panel). So the user has to go through the document adding section markers in designated places, such as chapter openings.
The problem is that if pages are added or removed in the course of designing and editing the book, these section markers will end up on the wrong page. As soon as there are a dozen or more sections, it becomes a huge hassle to have to reset all the section markers by hand.
That’s where the Sections Stuff script comes in. The script allows the user to set up all the sections in the document based on a list of paragraph styles. So, if there should always be a new section wherever the paragraph style “New Chapter” appears (for example), simply select this paragraph style from one of the scripts drop-down lists, and click OK. The script will add sections wherever it finds this paragraph style.
The user also has the option to remove all currently existing section markers.
All the user-defined settings are stored on a per-document basis and the script will remember them, saving the user the hassle of having to select the desired paragraph styles each time.
New in version 1.3: You can now choose at which section the main book starts. All sections before that will use the numbering style of the first section of the book (the first section is always the first page of the document). And numbering will restart at 1 for the main book section.
This allows you to use roman numerals for prelims – the front matter of the book – as is customary, while still being able to easily update all the sections in your entire book based on paragraph styles.
Here’s a screenshot:
To download a demo version of this script, click here. The demo version is limited to 50-page documents.
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Jennifer
November 29, 2023 6:33 pmFeature suggestion: this would be AMAZING if there was a way to control “start numbering at” as you created these sections by paragraph type.
Here’s the use case: we prepare a LOT of proposals with strict page limits that tabs/dividers don’t count toward. It looks a bit strange to have the page numbering go to a higher number than the page limit – I’d really like to not make my clients count pages to ensure we’re in compliance.
So every time there’s a divider, I have to start a new section on the page after the divider, and manually set the “start numbering at” to skip the divider pages. If the number of pages between dividers changes as the document evolves, all these sections have to be manually re-set.
The only trick I’ve found for avoiding this is to use paragraph numbering instead, but that’s more than a bit tedious as well as the master page has to be overridden on each page to make that work. Any thoughts on adding this?
Katherine
April 14, 2022 9:26 pmI purchased this and need confirmation that this script ONLY works for marking whole pages as new sections. I’ve used it and that is what I am getting.
I am looking for something to restart footnote numbering at 1 for each subhead. Is that possible??
Example
Subhead A paragraphs have 1-10 footnotes; same page next Subhead A would restart footnotes at 1 again.
thanks for any help!
Ariel
April 14, 2022 11:54 pmHi Katherine,
Yes, unfortunately there is no way to restart footnote numbering on the same page in InDesign (unless you were to break up the text frame into separate frames on each page after your Subhead A, which would be very unwieldly).
Sections Stuff won’t be able to help you here I’m afraid.
I guess your options are to fake the footnote numbers (hide the real ones by colouring them white and making them very small), or to use an add-on that manages footnotes independently of InDesign’s system, like Footwork: https://www.id-extras.com/products/footwork/
Ariel