Annotations

Inkwell keeps two independent families of notes. The first is the ordinary one covered in Footnotes/Endnotes. The second is called annotations, and it is numbered, placed, and styled entirely separately.

This is what scholarly editions need. It lets you run, say, author's notes at the foot of the page while textual or editorial notes collect at the back of the book, without the two sequences interfering with each other.

Turning a note into an annotation

Annotations are not inserted with a separate button. Create the note as usual with Insert Footnote , then click the note's marker — the small number or symbol in the text. Clicking it moves the note between the two families; click again to move it back.

With Inline Notes on in the Tools menu, the number shown beside the note's text in the chapter does the same thing, so you can move a note between the families while looking at what it says.

Because the two families are numbered separately, a note will change its number as it switches sides.

The annotations section

The Open dropdown at the bottom of the chapter list (next to Insert) always has an Annotations item. Click it for a single page listing every annotation in the book, grouped by chapter, which is a convenient way to read through them all. Each entry has a jump button that takes you to the place in the text it belongs to. This is available regardless of the Placement setting below or whether the book has any annotations yet.

To make annotations appear as their own section in the built book, add the section: Insert → Annotations in the chapter list. It works exactly like the Notes section — Inkwell fills it in, keeps it up to date, and sets Placement to Book Endnote for you. Once that section exists, it also gets its own permanent entry directly in the chapter list — the Open dropdown's Annotations item is always there too, and opens the same page either way.

Settings

Project Settings → Annotations carries the same controls as Notes, applied to this family only:

• Placement — Footnote (at the bottom of the page), Chapter Endnote (collected at the end of each chapter), or Book Endnote (collected at the back of the book). This is set for annotations alone: annotations start at the bottom of the page and stay there when you move the ordinary notes elsewhere. To collect them at the back of the book, choose Book Endnote here, which adds the Annotations section for you.
• Marker — the numbering scheme, plus Marker Size and Marker Baseline for how the marker sits against the surrounding text.
• Name — what the section is called in the built book.
• Layout of the note text itself: Clearance, Gap, Indent, and Font Size.

Setting the two families to different placements and different marker schemes — numbers for one, symbols for the other — is what makes them readable side by side.

The section's own title

The Annotations section is titled independently of the Notes section. Click its entry in the chapter list and edit the title there, exactly as you would for Notes — a book can head one "Notes (Original)" and the other "Annotations (2026)" and the built book will honour both. Everything else the section carries is its own as well: its headpiece and tailpiece, how many columns it sets in, and whether the title prints at all.

The same is true of the note layout itself. Number Style and Number Width — described under Footnotes/Endnotes — are set here for annotations alone, which matters when the two families number differently. A chapter with several dozen annotations in lowercase Roman numerals produces much wider numbers than the ordinary notes ever will.