I've taken a look through a few recent scholarly publications and other non-fiction works with notes. In scholarly publishing, there seems to be a tendency towards inline citations rather than footnotes or endnotes; in popular non-fiction, endnotes are clearly preferred to footnotes, as they have been for some times. The note indicator is almost always a superscript number, the size and height of which, however, and a remarkable number of publications use fake superscripts.

The old asterix, dagger, doubledagger sequence was only ever useful for footnotes, generally where notes were sparse. Today they are used only informally, or in texts where notes are very rare. As soon as you have complex notes, multiple citations, etc. you really need a numeric system.

Regarding localised numeral styles, I presume that the numeral style used for notes should be the same as that used elsewhere in the text. Use of European numerals is now very widespread, and it is relatively uncommon to see localised numerals in use. This is rather sad, especially since the localised numerals usually look better withint he context of the local scripts, but it is clearly the trend. I guess the implied question behind your query is 'Should e.g. an Arabic or Devanagari font contain sups glyphs and lookups for superior localised numerals?' I think it is possible that a minority of users might indeed find these useful.

> In scholarly publishing, there seems to be a tendency towards inline citations rather than footnotes or endnotes

http://www.mla.org

Thanks guys this info is useful. Cheers, Si

Use a circle, triangle, square, pentangon, etc... instead of numbers, or maybe the poker cards simbols or hands with rising fingers to count and mark the footnotes if you want to make something "cool". Also if printing allows you could use color dots.

Héctor

For shapes, for two, perhaps a pointed oval so that it is just made up of two lines.

The cool and the non-cool legal scholars use footnotes with arabic numerals; daggers and asterisks for introductory notes.
Some publications use superscript indented. Some use flush left followed by a period + "tab".

None that I know use the margin like Bringhurst recommends:

Text Text
Text Text Text
------
1 Note
2 Note

---- where the footnote markers are outdented, and the "Note" text is flush with the body text's left margin

I saw a really cool book once - or maybe it was an article - I wish I could remember what (forgive the Alzheimers), where the word or phrase that needed the footnote was in a different color and then there was a corresponding box, the same color that contained the footnote. Of course that wouldn't work for just any sort of text but it looked great and was very easy to follow.