[Brian Knittel]

to add to Suzanne's answer, instead of hiding the field you could also set
its font color to "white" and, say, its leading to "exactly 1 pt." ...
The fundamental problem with such an approach in conjunction with a modern
text processor like Word is that (Word) is not at all page-oriented. Thus,
page-by-page revisions don't work really well not matter what you do. In a
sensible document, when you change something on page 1, this change itself
might result in altered pagination up to page 25 easily.

There is a vast segment of the technical document space that is page
controlled; that is, pagination is not allowed to change, due to
governmental regulations or just corporate policy. If editing causes a new
page break, you can't just renumber the succeeding pages. You have to insert
an outliner page. For example, if the content of page 11 spills to a new
page, you can't renumber page 12 to 13, 13 to 14 and so on, you have to
insert a page 11a. Word's making page flow invisible to its object model
doesn't make automating the job any easier! There are hundreds of millions
of pages of documents out there that require this sort of control, and the
individual revision marking that I've been discussing. These, plus more
significant issues like the instability of outline numbering mean Word is a
poor choice for maintaining technical documents. Yet, corporations and
agencies still decide to use it, so we're stuck with it.

Using 1 point white text could work technically, but the purpose of all this
is to assist in easy and accurate maintenance of the document. Short leading
would make the embedded marker text nearly impossible to find or edit. I
guess I could write macros to enlarge or shrink the text based on stylename,
but the idea still makes me uncomfortable. Hidden text would have been such
a good solution because you can enable and disable its display quite easily.
And in fact I'd set up the style for these marker paragraphs as having a
colored background shade and a thick border, so its presence on the page was
unmistakable. But, unfortunately, as Susan noted, there appears to be no way
to prevent {STYLEREF} from carrying the hidden attribute along with the
text, so the text can't be invisible in the body but visible in the footer.

Unless there's a field that extracts just the text from its argument,
stripping all formatting? Then I could nest the STYLEREF inside that.

Anyway -- I think that a text box overlaying the footer may be the only
option. STYLEREF is not usable, and I investigated using SET, but you can't
multiply define bookmarks, so that won't work either. I just don't see any
other options. I'll discuss with the client and see where it goes.

Thanks for your input
Brian