I am an e-book addict. I have been taking e-books and turning them into clean text and then into audio for about 5-1/2 years now. I've listened to about 2500 nonfiction e-books. I use firebug to copy the innerHTML in the body copy and then strip out all of the HTML tags and I am then left with clean text except for the footnotes and some other problems that I need to clean up.

I have functions that I use to remove things that are in parentheses, square brackets, curly brackets and then I perform a whole series of text manipulations on the text to prepare it for the text to speech software to work properly.

Getting rid of the footnote numbers has been a major pain. Currently I go through the book from top to bottom and manually find each footnote number and delete it. Sometimes the numbering starts at one in the first chapter and can go up to 250 or more by the end of the book. Other times, the numbering restarts at 1 for each chapter.

I wrote a macro that started at the highest number footnote and searched backwards for each number as a negatively incremented counter. But the problem is when there are dates or other sorts of numbers within the text the deletion process deletes the wrong numbers.

I don't mind working my way through the document, looking at each individual footnote number but visually searching for the numbers is somewhat straining.

I thought perhaps there might be some way to create a modal window with yes or no buttons and a (reset counter to 1) button so I could hit the yes or no button to confirm the deletion of each number. If I had no it would search forward and find the next occurrence of the counter variable. If I hit yes it would delete the number from the page then increment the variable and search again. If I hit reset it would set the variable to 1 and start searching again.

This would really be extremely handy and I truly appreciate any help you might be able to give.

Tim Anderson