academic standard pagination in margin

[Tim-A]

In many classical works - Plato, Aristotle, etc - there is a convention that all translations carry standard pagination referring to an early printing of each original greek text. These references are usually a combination of numbers and letters: for example in Aristotle the standard text is one produced by Bekker which appears as, for eaxmple, 25a10 (meaning that a particular place in the text is on bekker's page 25, in column a, and it's the tenth line down).

I am producing a large number of books for publishing and need to insert these numbers in the outer margin of each page (usually about 6 or 7 times per page). I can use a text box, putting it in the outer margin (i.e. the left margin on even pages and the right on odd pages) but this is slow and if the text happens to move from on page to another the box is in the wrong place and even in the wrong margin. Does anyone know of a way of marking a place with a piece of text which would then automatically show up in the outer margin? I have around 10,000 pages to do and am reluctant to use my text box method.

[Charles Kenyon]

I understand your reluctance. Any solution I can imagine is going to involve IF fields testing for whether you are on an even page or an odd page and creating two text boxes, one for even and one for odd. That would respond to changes in pagination but would be a real pain to set up. Once you have it set, though, you could save this field as an AutoText entry. You would still need to put in the page numbers.

This may help: Microsoft Word Field Maths Tutorial