Footnotes and notecalls in XML workflow for InDesign

Question

I'm a french typesetter working on a project using XML workflow with a large number of footnotes. I have been searching for hours the right way to prepare the XML workflow so I would get all the notecalls and footnotes once the workflow imported in my InDesign file. Thanks in advance to any helping hand.

Answer 1

I wish I could express myself in another language as well as you handle English -- and my bread and butter is typesetting text that is challenging linguistically.
However, I also like to think of my work as setting type, and because I associate XML with robot formatting I am inherently biased against it.  Perhaps I'll learn better, but currently I'm not a good source for information on XML.
Still, as I see it XML attempts to come up with a single source for output in various formats.  InDesign is really good for making PDF's ready for the press or for distribution electronically: it defines documents in terms of pages and offers precise control over what goes where on every page.  This is very important in my work, scholarly material that generally includes linguistic oddities requiring absolute control over fonts.  Meanwhile, footnotes -- which of course assume there are pages at whose foot they can sit -- have always been an afterthought in ID, omitted from early versions, and still the subject of many complaints for their inflexibility.
Thus two early questions are:
Is InDesign footnoting capable of doing what you need?  My guess is yes so long as you can tweak in ID; but if not then whoever gets tasked with using the masters you develop may not appreciate having to string a separate story of footnotes by hand across the bottoms of pages.
Do you need to get from ID back to XML?  I've already mentioned that getting ID footnotes back into XML is a significant issue, but there are other factors: if you use ID PDFs for proofing but the ID files are not going back to XML then corrections must be made to both the XML and ID files.  And whether or not you export ID back to XML you get to figure out which ID tweaks are needed in the XML.
Software manuals tend to explain what the software can do and omit discussion of what one might wish it could do.  One of the things I appreciate about Dorothy J. Hoskins's brief 2013 book XML and InDesign is her chapter "What InDesign Cannot Do (or Do Well) with XML," though she this isn't the only place she discusses philosophical conflicts between ID and XML.  She also touches on the value of XSLT transformations and scripting for wrangling XML, and mentions useful tidbits about Maidvald’s book since its 2007 publication.
Good luck!
David