Activedocument.Footnotes.Reference.Text

[macropod]

Hi dorogoi,

My intent is to convert an existing document's (created by a third party) foot/endnotes to regular text at the end of the document, maintaining the original reference marks precisely (i.e. superscript mark in-paragraph and at the beginning of the footnote text).

For converting endnotes, you could use code like:

Sub UnLinkEndNotes()
Dim eRng As Range, eNote As Endnote, i As Integer
With ActiveDocument
  For Each eNote In .Endnotes
    With eNote
      i = .Index
      With .Reference.Characters.Last
        .InsertBefore i
        .Style = "Endnote Reference"
      End With
      .Range.Cut
    End With
    Set eRng = .Range
    With eRng
      .InsertAfter vbCr & i & " - "
      .Start = .End
      .Paste
      .Style = "Endnote Text"
    End With
  Next
  For Each eNote In .Endnotes
    eNote.Delete
  Next
End With
End Sub

With minor changes, the code can process footnotes instead. Nonetheless, footnotes will be inserted at the end of the document - programatically inserting them at the foot of each page is problematic, especially because Word uses the current printer driver to work out where the automatic page breaks should occur. Change printers and you could end up with page breaks occuring in a different position.

There is potential for foot/endnote marks to be interlaced, upper/lower case letters/roman numerals and numbers -- with manual edits (renumbering) as well.

Provided you convert the footnotes and endnotes separately, the fact they're interspersed within the document shouldn't matter. A limitation of the above macro, though, is that it doesn't handle the different numbering schemes that usually entails - for whichever references require it, you would need to do a bit of post-processing on the reference numbers to convert them to, say, roman numerals. The fact the macro preserves the corresponding Style names makes this fairly easy to do. An alternative is to change the footnotes to endnotes before running the macro, then process them all as a single set. I do note, though, your desire not to do this.

And all of the above does not take into account if there is a manually assigned value (i.e. maybe the original author skipped numbers 10 through 19 for some reason).

With Word, that's not a problem - simply because any re-starts & skipped ranges will be ignored by the macro. Usually, you can only re-start on a Section by Section basis. Again, the macro could be modofied to process each Section independently and to put the notes at the end of the Section rather than at the end of the document. What you might need to deal with, though, is footnote/endnote cross-references. I suggest dealing with those by converting them to plain text (eg by selecting them and pressing Ctrl-Shift-F9) before running the above macro.