[Brian Knittel]

Hi,

I have a need to be able to embed a text phrase on various pages in my
document that will not be printed as part of the page, but which will be
picked up from the page and displayed in the footer. The goal here is to be
able to add content to the page footer on a page-by-page basis, which we'll
use to put a revision number on changed pages. (I'd like to define the page
footer once in the document and not have to insert section breaks so that
selected pages can have their own footer definition -- too hard to
maintain).

For example, I'd like to be able to embed the string "Rev 1" somewhere on
page 3, and have "Rev 1" appear in the footer of page 3 and only page 3.
The phrase "Rev 1" shouldn't appear in the body of page 3 -- just in the
footer.

I've been experimenting with the {STYLEREF} field. If I style the text "Rev
1" with a style named "RevTextStyle" created just for this purpose, I can
pick up the text in the footer with {STYLEREF "RevTextStyle"}. If the next
page doesn't need a marker, {STYLEREF} picks up the same text, so I have to
create an emtpy RevTextStyle paragraph on the next page to give {STYLEREF}
something to pick up on this and subsequent pages.

The problem is that if I use the Hidden font attribute to hide the
RevTextStyle paragraph in the body of the page, it's also hidden in the
footer, and even \* MERGEFORMAT doesn't seem to let me make the text
visible always. Any suggestions?

Or any ideas for other mechanisms to do this? This is a common requirement
for industrial/government/military type documents, so people have to have
encountered this before lots of times.

I've considered using a text box (Shape object) positioned to overlap the
footer. That could work too, but it's seems easy to mess up its positioning
accidentally. I'd appreciate any ideas anyone might have for handling this.

Thanks,
Brian