You're asked to enter several things: the width of the sidenote textframes and the distance between the sidenote and the main text. It displays this dialog (the values shown are script defaults): Open the document whose footnotes you want to convert to sidenotes and run the script. You can convert all notes or just notes that use a selected paragraph style. The script (sidenotes.jsx) converts footnotes in a document to sidenotes. When new notes are added, the numbers are updated automatically. The notes are added to the document as anchored text frames, so that when the main text is edited, the notes travel with the note references.

The screenshot shows an example of a document whose footnotes have been converted to sidenotes. Like InDesign's footnotes, sidenotes can be numbered by document, by section, by spread, or by page. A second script can be used to create new notes in a document. (After finishing the scripts and these pages I became aware of Martin Fischer's script dealing with sidenotes in CS3 – see this thread on The script can be used to set up sidenotes in a new document, too, both numbered and unnumbered notes. Based on the method for dynamic endnotes first outlined by Peter Gold and formalised in InDesign by Bob Bringhurst, and following on from the scripted approach of this method (see Dynamic endnotes), this page provides scripts to convert InDesign footnotes to sidenotes (or 'margin notes') and to set up a sidenote system in new documents.

Convert indd to scribus