I have made some tweaks and updates to my translation of Targum Ruth and I wanted to update it on the site. Before I did that I wanted to delete all the footnotes. You see, I use notes in my translation as my the basis of my commentary so they are fairly expansive and full of lots of rhetorical questions not really fit for public consumption. But how to delete them all in one go?
I use Nisus Writer Pro for my academic writing and have done since 1994. Back in the day, the old version of Nisus had a very nasty bug that bit me in my doctoral viva. If you didn’t delete a footnote properly (from within the text, not in the note itself) the numbering would go haywire. There is even still an FAQ about it on their site. Once bitten twice shy, as they old codgers say (that would be me), so I did a quick search to find out how to delete all footnotes in NWP. I found some neat macros to move all the notes inline (and back again), macros and scripting are some of the real strengths of NWP, but not hints about deleting them all in one go.
I girded my electronic loins (I had backups) and simply highlighted all the notes and hit the delete key. NWP asked, “Do you really want to delete XXX of footnotes?” And I said “Yes!” Voila! All the footnotes were gone, not fuss no muss.
NB: I know many use Mellel, as I did when it first came out and before Nisus had NWP running on the new OSX. Today they released version 3.0!
