Sidenote

Some books will have short descriptions of the paragraph along the side of the text. These are called sidenotes.

Proofing Sidenotes

During P1, P2, & P3 rounds, proof the text and separate the sidenotes from the main text with blank lines. Sidenotes should be proofed just like any other paragraph (eg., split words should be re-joined, naked dashes clothed, etc.). Where the OCR (or the previous round) has placed a sidenote at the top of the page, there is no necessity to insert a blank line above it (though it is not wrong to do so).

Formatting Sidenotes

During F1 & F2 rounds, move sidenotes to just above the paragraph that they belong to, and surround them with a sidenote tag [Sidenote: and ], with the text of the sidenote placed in between.

Format the sidenote text as it is printed, preserving the line breaks, italics, etc. (while handling end-of-line hyphenation and dashes normally). Leave a blank line before and after the sidenote to separate it from the normal text.

If there are multiple sidenotes for a single paragraph, put them one after another at the start of the paragraph. Leave a blank line separating each of them.

If the paragraph began on a previous page, put the sidenote at the top of the page and mark it with * so that the post-processor can see that it belongs on the previous page, like this: *[Sidenote: (text of sidenote)]. The post-processor will move it to the appropriate place.

Exceptions

Sometimes a Project Manager will request that you put sidenotes next to the sentence they apply to, rather than at the top or bottom of the paragraph. In this case, don't separate them out with blank lines.

See more in the Formatting Guidelines.

For PPers

This page has some suggestions for how you might handle sidenotes in your HTML so they work well in epub/mobi.