footnotes 101

Or, I just explain to my clients that I will "fix" the footnotes on the final draft, and then let them fall where they may during edits. On the final draft, I will adjust the page breaks (ususally by adjusting the "Keep with" settings in Pagination properties) to ensure that my footnotes are on the same page as their references. Doing this too early will drive you nuts. The key to this approach is to be sure the client understands, and can wait until the final draft to see the corrected layout.

~Barb

I add a footnote (four or five words) in the last two lines of the body, and FM whisks it away to the next page.

Unless there is a new feature in FM10, it has ever been thus. FM9 help says:
Adding text to a footnote may cause the last footnote in a column or on a page to move to the bottom of the next column or page. To reduce the chance of a footnote not fitting in a column, allocate more space for footnotes in a column.

If footnotes are sparse in the document, and are not being cataloged, a work-around hack would be to fake a footnote.

In the host paragraph, insert an anchored frame, "bottom of column". This frame behaves the way you would like footnotes to behave. It "keeps" on the same page as the host pgf.

Insert a text frame in the anchored frame.

Write the footnote text in the text frame. Apply a paragraph format named, say "FootNote.Frame" (but not "Footnote"). Give it an auto-number (it won't be possible to use the real footnote numbering sequence, as far as I know)*.

In the host paragraph insert a cross-reference named, say "FootNoteXref", to the footnote, formatted as superscript <$paranumonly>.

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* You could assign the next available real footnote number by creating an invisible real footnote nearby and Xref'ing to it by <$paranumonly>. But now we'd be escalating from hack to kludge. Disclaimer: this paragraph is not a real footnote.