Allow inserting symbolic footnotes (e.g., asterisk *) without affecting numbered footnotes
In many types of publishing—especially academic, religious, and literary works—there is often a need to insert symbolic footnotes, such as a single asterisk (), double asterisks (*), dagger (†), or other custom characters, without affecting the numbering sequence of standard footnotes in the document.
Currently, InDesign only supports one unified footnote style per document, which means that using a symbol instead of a number affects all footnotes globally. This makes it impossible to add a single symbolic note while keeping the rest of the footnotes numbered.
Feature Request: Please consider allowing users to insert a one-time, manually defined footnote symbol (like a star or dagger) alongside normal numbered footnotes. This could be implemented as:
A "custom footnote marker" option when inserting a footnote
Or an "inline note" feature with a customizable reference marker and body text
This flexibility would be highly valuable to book designers, editors, and academic publishers who frequently need to use both symbolic and numeric footnotes in the same document.
Zuhair Al-Jubori
shared this idea
-
Aaron Troia commented
also being able to customize which symbols are used for footnotes or where it should go from singles to doubles, triples. etc. I always have to change footnotes by hand after 4 because we don't use the paragraph looking symbol at our publishing house. It would be nice to say repeat with double, triple, etc after a specific symbol.