using all footnotes
Hi there,
How could I copy and paste all footnotes in a document, or even page by page, in order to import them in a database through a csv file?
This just seems to be impossible!
Thank you
You can try doing this. Click one footnote to select it (you will see a blue outline around it). Make sure you don't click inside; you don't want to edit the content, you just want to select it. Then go to Edit > Copy. Open any word processor (Pages, TextEdit etc) and go to Edit > Paste. All footnotes will be pasted in with the footnote numbers preserved as well.
You can also paste the footnotes in Numbers (or Excel) instead, where each footnote will go into a separate cell. Click once in the top left cell in Numbers and then go to Edit > Paste. Numbers will add as many rows as needed. Again, click only once to select the cell; if you end up placing the cursor inside the cell, all footnotes will be pasted into that single cell. After that you can export to csv from Numbers/Excel.
The problem with pasting into a spreadsheet, however, is that if you have footnotes that include more than one paragraph, each paragraph will end up in its own cell, so you will need to tidy things up afterwards. However, footnote numbers are preserved in the process so that should help you merge those cells more easily (Table > Merge Cells in Numbers) provided your document is not that long.
I hope this helps with what you want to do.