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I want to record a macro to embed (thousands of) footnotes.

In the documents the the footnote number markers are at the correct locations in the text, and the correspondingly numbered text of the footnotes are at the end of the file.

So I want to record a macro that searches for a footnote marker; copies the number, pastes that number into the find field to find the correspondingly numbered footnote text (which will then be cut and pasted at location of the marker).

All of this is fairly straightforward, except: the macro recorder does not record the action of copying and pasting the number into the find field; it records only the literal search done. That is, if "1" is copied from the first footnote marker and pasted in the Find field, it will record only that it searched for "1", and on the next loop, after copying "2" from the next marker, it will search for 1 again, instead of pasting "2" and searching for that.

Is there a way to make a macro search, on subsequent loops, for the current contents of the pasteboard rather than for a literal number?

Not that I'm aware of. As far I know the macro will always contain the literal number that you searched for when you recorded it.

There was a discussion about this a few weeks ago and this post claims to have found a solution, but I can't make head or tail of it. Maybe you can.

I saw that post too, and couldn't make much sense of it either, but I don't think it quite addresses the same thing.

I've since found a sort of workaround using an external macro utility (Key Text) which lets you compile a macro as a series of keystrokes, e.g.: {Ctrl c}{F5}{Ctrl v}. But for some reason this particular set of keystrokes runs v.e.r.y...s.l.o.w.l.y. -- will probably take about 15 hours to do the job! But, oh well, I can wait.