First of all, thank you very much for your help and attention.

While I seem to have more or less understood what you're saying, I am really looking for an animated way to do this with a "what you see is what you get" preview in real-time.

It is very frustrating that even a program like InDesign does not make this possible.

There is an add-in for InDesign that makes the footnotes "in-line", as to say and it costs almost $500!

The other issue (footnotes to footnotes) would seem to make perfect sense in a scholarly work, which is what I'm working on, where I am writing a translation of a text in the footnotes, and adding source material for that translation in footnotes to footnotes.

I think there is a program called NotaBenna that does this but the learning curve is so steep so I'm not going to try, and therefore I was asking if anybody is aware of a more elegant and easy solution to my predicament
thank you
Susan