May 18, 2001, Midlothian, Virginia. This morning Virginia Systems unveiled Sonar Bookends® Fnote, a footnote XTension for QuarkXPress. Expected to begin shipping in late May, Sonar Bookends Fnote is designed to make footnotes and endnotes quick and easy to create and manage.

Footnotes, which appear at the bottom of a page, and endnotes, which appear at the end of a document, are linked to their references using a labeling system. Thus, a reference to a footnote can be created long before the actual footnote or endnote has been added. Alternatively, footnotes and endnotes can be created before there are any references to them. All that ultimately matters is that the label on both the note and its reference are the same.

Sonar Bookends Fnote dynamically numbers all footnotes and endnotes. The note numbers have a style sheet applied to them and then the numbers are placed in the appropriate locations in the body of the text and in front of the notes themselves. Sonar Bookends Fnote assigns one style sheet to notes and a different style sheet to note references. This allows the formatting for all occurrences of notes or their references or both to be modified by simply changing the definition of one or both style sheets.

The footnotes and endnotes are also sorted automatically so that their order matches the order of the references in the text. The numbering system for both footnotes and endnotes can be set individually, as well. By default, footnotes use Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3), while endnotes use Roman numerals (i, ii, iii).

Anytime a document is changed, all that is necessary is to tell Sonar Bookends Fnote to update the footnote numbers. In seconds, all of the document's footnote and endnote numbers will be adjusted and the notes sorted as necessary. Even documents consisting of multiple files can be handled by opening all of the files before updating the footnote numbers.

Sonar Bookends Fnote, with a retail price of $195, will be available for both Macintosh and Windows. A free demo can be downloaded from Virginia Systems' web site at www.virginiasystems.com.

Virginia Systems was founded in 1984 and specializes in document imaging, text retrieval, automatic index-generation, cross-referencing, and footnote software.

For further information, contact: Virginia Systems, 5509 West Bay Court, Midlothian, VA 23112-2506, Phone: (804) 739-3200, FAX: (804) 739-8376, Email: sales@virginiasystems.com, URL: www.virginiasystems.com