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MFS1176
MFS1176
Participant
December 10, 2018
Answered

Multiple footnotes in one paragraph are causing me to lose the rest of the text

  • December 10, 2018
  • 4 replies
  • 1907 views

Hello

I am currently on Indesign CC 2019 and have a problem with a client's scholarly journal that I am having problem resolving.

1. The 100 page document is a mix of Arabic and English;

2. The journal is setup as a two-column work with the footnotes setup to span the two columns;

3. There is a particular paragraph which contains 4 fairly lengthy footnotes (with the document setup as a 7" x 10" with .75" margins - the footnotes are a total of about 25 lines);

4. When I import this portion of the document into Indesign, only the first two lines of the paragraph in question appear on the page and the rest of it, which contains the four lengthy footnotes) disappears - it does not flow onto the proceeding pages;

5. The text is there as if I change the subsequent pages to a single column, I can see the rest of the text until the end of the document;

The below screen captures explain what is happening. As you can see, the quotation highlighted cuts off, and then if I continue it on the next page with two columns, the text does not flow onto that page, however on the next page (69) setup as a single column, the text successfully flows over.

Does anyone have a fix for this, seeing as the client requires two columns for all articles and footnotes to span over the two columns (as seen on pg. 69)

Thank you

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer MFS1176

The final layout:

4 replies

Barb Binder
Community Expert
Barb BinderCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 11, 2018

I agree with Jongware and Vlandan. I also work with footnote intensive-documents and when multiple note references are on a single line, they all move to the next page, whether or not split footnotes is allowed. That's how it has worked for as long as I can remember.

The trick is to break the notes onto multiple lines: Vlandan's solution of working with tracking was a good one, as was your decision to move to the 2-column format.

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
MFS1176
MFS1176AuthorCorrect answer
Participant
December 11, 2018

The final layout:

vladan saveljic
vladan saveljic
Inspiring
December 10, 2018

in this particular case you should select the paragraph and increase the tracking value to move note 109 to the next line

before increase the tracking value:

after increase the tracking value and move the footnote referenc number to the next line:

    Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
    Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
    Legend
    December 10, 2018

    You might be running into a common problem when the document has such long, detailed footnotes or several within a short span of text.

    Try adjusting the Footnote Options in the Type menu. Some options to consider:

    • Spacing before/between footnotes
    • Allow split footnotes

    Also check the settings of the paragraph style that's set to format the footnotes. Does it contain a "keep with next" setting? Or something else in the Keeps Options settings, such as "start on next right-hand page"?

    Are there any "no break" settings or overrides on any of the text?

    Just case, try clearing any manual formatting overrides on both the body text and footnotes, and instead let the paragraph styles do the formatting. There might be formatting or code in the text that's causing this. Use the + button in the paragraph styles panel to toggle on/off the swimming-pool-green highlight that indicates overrides.

    Hope this helps.

    |    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |
    Jongware
    Community Expert
    JongwareCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 10, 2018

    https://forums.adobe.com/people/Bevi+Chagnon+%7C+PubCom  wrote

    You might be running into a common problem when the document has such long, detailed footnotes or several within a short span of text.

    Try adjusting the Footnote Options in the Type menu. Some options to consider:

    • Spacing before/between footnotes
    • Allow split footnotes

    -- on your last bullet point: Those footnotes 107, 108, and the first line of 109 are still going to force a break there. They all appear in the same text line, and so they must be kept together with that text line. It doesn't help that 108 in between is a quarter-page monster. (I've had 3/4 page long footnotes like these, and still the author insisted that he felt everything should be able to fit on a single page.)

    MFS1176
    MFS1176Author
    Participant
    December 10, 2018

    Hello

    Thank you to all who responded to me on this issue. I took what all of you said and tried each thing one by one and then in combination but nothing seemed to work, however I then got it working by deleting the footnote numbers and thus the footnotes as well, recreating the text boxes and flowing the text into them and then re-created the footnotes and it worked. Mind you, by doing the above (removing the footnotes) it allowed me to correctly flow the text from one 2 column page to the other and then as the other two long footnotes were on the second page, first column, it worked as required.

    Thanks again to all who replied and assisted.

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