[bambax]

Yes. The original idea was to have some LLM place footnotes references in the text, based on the content of the footnotes themselves, but as I say in the blog post, that failed spectacularly.

Now another idea is to manually put placeholders for footnotes references in the text, and then number them automatically. Before that, I manually enter the number of footnotes on each page, for verification. I have already done this for the first two volumes, it's pretty fast. Having the number of footnotes on a page lets:

- check that the number of footnotes is correct

- (and therefore) also check that footnotes numbers are also correct (from 1 to n, in order)

- also check that the number of footnotes references is also correct (should exactly match the number of footnotes)

- and finally, properly number the placeholders.

Manually inputing numbers in the main text would be very difficult and error-prone, but simply putting placeholders and checking them automatically, should be much faster and safer.