Updated February 18, 2026

Spotlight on CMOS 13.57

When you read a book that includes source citations, do you prefer footnotes or endnotes? Publishers tend to assume that the average reader will want endnotes, on the principle that they’re less distracting than footnotes.

Publishers also know that the books that sell the best often have no notes at all. For books that are likely to attract a lot of readers, the trend has therefore been toward “invisible” notes—unmarked in the text but listed at the end of the book, usually by page number and key phrase.

But how do authors, editors, and publishers keep track of what the notes are referring to if there aren’t any note numbers in the text? To answer that, let’s start with the published version.

Invisible Endnotes in Practice

Figure 13.6 (under CMOS 13.57) shows what page 266 looks like in Gillian O’Brien’s Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2015). That page consists of endnotes that apply to text toward the end of chapter 9 and the beginning of chapter 10 of O’Brien’s book.

For those of you who don’t have access to the figure in CMOS, here’s a snippet from the middle, showing two consecutive endnotes:

Those numbers in the left-hand column are page and note numbers. The number 188 refers to a note for page 188 (the only one on that page), and 190n1 refers to the first of four notes for page 190. The two phrases in bold and italics are taken from those respective pages in the text.

Most books don’t add note numbers in addition to the page numbers for pages that have more than one note; the key phrases are sufficient for finding the passages of text to which the notes refer, and the note numbers don’t actually appear in the text. But they’re an option, and they make it easier to cite a specific note in O’Brien’s book.

As for the key phrases, they don’t need to be in bold and italics (many books just use regular text), but they are usually followed by a colon. Any quotation marks should be limited to those that appear in the text (like the ones in Speaking “as a citizen”).

The Author’s Job

For authors, it’s business as usual. For the sake of example, let’s focus on the note to page 188 in O’Brien’s book, but we’ll pretend that it ends after the word “trial.” Here’s what the relevant portion of the main text of the authors’ manuscript might look like:

Speaking “as a citizen,” McConnell suggested that the verdict resulted from “a probable objection of some of the jurors to the death penalty on circumstantial evidence. . . . You will probably find that Mr. Culver was not the only man upon the jury who was opposed to the hanging of the three principal defendants.”³³

______________

³³ Quoted in Chicago Daily News, “Four Men Guilty,” Dec. 16, 1889. McConnell may have been pleased that no death sentences were passed, for he had been part of the clemency movement that followed the Haymarket trial.

That note (which we’ve assigned number 33 for the sake of the example) would be inserted using the footnote feature in Microsoft Word. This is no different from any manuscript with numbered notes.

The Editor’s Job

Now let’s see what happens to that same text when the copyeditor gets it. (To make things easy, we’ll assume no edits to the author’s text were needed here.) And though the author could have highlighted the key phrases, it can be more efficient for the editor to do that. Here’s what that would look like:

Speaking “as a citizen,” McConnell suggested that the verdict resulted from “a probable objection of some of the jurors to the death penalty on circumstantial evidence. . . . You will probably find that Mr. Culver was not the only man upon the jury who was opposed to the hanging of the three principal defendants.”³³

Aside from the yellow highlighting, the manuscript stays the same, including the note number in the text and the corresponding note at the foot of the page (not repeated here).

The Typesetter’s Job

Once editing is complete, the typesetter gets the document. Typically, the Word manuscript will be imported into Adobe InDesign, where the footnotes are converted to endnotes.

Then the phrases highlighted by the copyeditor are copied into their respective endnotes and adjusted as needed (for starters, the comma that precedes the closing quotation mark in “as a citizen” would need to be deleted from the example above). And the note numbers are replaced by the relevant page numbers, which can be determined after formatting is complete and the pagination is final.

We’ve already seen the result in figure 13.6, but here it is as ordinary text (again, through the word “trial” in the original note):

188	Speaking “as a citizen”: Quoted in Chicago Daily News, “Four Men Guilty,” Dec. 16, 1889. McConnell may have been pleased that no death sentences were passed, for he had been part of the clemency movement that followed the Haymarket trial.

In the EPUB version of O’Brien’s book, the endnotes are hyperlinked from the page and note numbers to the location in the text that contains the key phrase. Reflowable ebook formats don’t generally have visible page numbers, but it’s okay to keep them in the endnotes to use as the basis of the links; some books link the key phrases.

But the links don’t go both ways. In the ebook as in print, readers won’t find any signal in the text telling them that there’s a note. Instead, they’ll need to navigate to the notes at the end of the book, just as readers of the print version are obliged to do.

But that’s the whole point of these invisible notes: to leave the text free of distractions of any kind.

Conclusion

It can be a challenge to create invisible notes, and the workflow suggested above won’t be right for every book. But with a little coordination and planning, it’s not all that difficult to do. Whether you will like the results—many readers want to find note numbers in the text and may even prefer footnotes to endnotes—is another matter.

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Invisible man image by Kevin Carden / Adobe Stock.

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