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QuintinSeegers
Legend
December 15, 2025
Answered

Strange table footnote behaviour on landscape pages

  • December 15, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 647 views

FM 2022 (17.0.6.798)

Structured

 

I have a table footnote on a landscape page. In FM, when I view the page, the text for the table footnote appears correctly:

QuintinSeegers_0-1765833073621.png

 

When I rotate the page to work on it, it also appears correctly:

QuintinSeegers_1-1765833105457.png

 

However, when I Save as PDF/Publish to PDF, the text on the footnote is rotated:

QuintinSeegers_2-1765833153228.png

 

I've not used table footnotes before, but this behaviour seems a little odd to me. Any suggestions/thoughts?

    Correct answer QuintinSeegers

    Before I logged a but, I thought I'd test it with a blank document. No issue. Will have to look at my EDD and template that I use - that may be the cause instead.


    So, here's what I've found (and it was all my own doing, it seems). I wasn't using the built-in Footnote and TableFootnote functionality properly. In my EDD, I had an Element (Footnote) but it didn't use the built-in Paragraph Styles for Footnot and TableFootnote.  I modified these to match our style settings as per our EDD and changed the document Footnote settings to match. I also created the missing TableFootnote frame on the Reference page. Once I did all these corrections, the TableFootnote now converts to PDF correctly, regardless of which method I use (Save as PDF, Publish, Print to PDF) or whether Distiller is used or not.

    2 replies

    Community Expert
    December 16, 2025

    Hi,

    How do you create your PDF?

    With or without Distiller?

    I guess that this might make a difference.

    Best regards, Winfried

    QuintinSeegers
    Legend
    December 16, 2025

    @Winfried Reng Without Distiller. A long time ago I had a subscription to Acrobat, which I've since cancelled. When I try to use Distiller now, it says I need an active subscription for Acrobat. Realising I still had Acrobat installed, I uninstalled it, which now broke Framemaker because it's now missing the Adobe PDF printer. So now I have a different issue to resolve first.

    Jeff_Coatsworth
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    December 16, 2025

    You probably need to reinstall FM to get the "headless" Distiller back - search the FM forum for the topic of "missing Adobe PDF printer instance" for threads on how to fix it.

    Community Expert
    December 15, 2025

    How do you "rotate the page?" Do you mean rotating the textflow? I have just tried that and was unable to reproduce the error.

     

    Bjørn Smalbro - FrameMaker.dk
    QuintinSeegers
    Legend
    December 16, 2025

    @FrameMaker-dk ,

    I set up a Master Page with the text frame rotated 90 degrees so the text is oriented landscape across the page, like so:

    QuintinSeegers_6-1765844067689.png

    I then rotate the page, so it appears onscreen like a landscape oriented page:

    QuintinSeegers_1-1765843813382.png

    I do this because it's easier to read the content that way.

     

    QuintinSeegers_5-1765844048511.png

     

    Once I'm done, I "unrotate" the page again.