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Hi all, it's good to be back.
I'm very familiar with Frame 4, 6, 7 and 8 from my days as Tech Writer before retiring 9 years ago. My next private writing project needs Frame but some behavior 4 or 5 revs down the road still puzzles me.
Specifically, Frame inserts a gap of about 1 inch between the body text and the footnotes any time the footnote (or footnotes) exceeds four lines of text. A paragraph can rattle along, get to an EOL then boom! Frame inserts the gap, cites the footnotes (correctly) then creates an ophan on the next page to finish the paragraph.
Changing the orphan/widow protection has no effect. I found the frame attributes dialog for that master page but there didn't seem to be anyway to control the gap. But maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. Everything seems to have moved around in 9 years.... 😉
And yes, this won't occur unless the footnote(s) exceed(s) 4 lines. The gap disappears (as does the orphan) when I move from a 5 line to a 4 line footnote. But nothing else seemed to change the behavior.
I suppose I could simply stick with 4 line footnotes through my book, but there's got to be a better solution. Any ideas?
Thanks!
David Blyth
What have you for the Widows, Orphans & Keeps in the Body paras?
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What newer version of FM?
I'm not seeing this behavior in a quick FM2020 test.
And what's the setting for
Format 🞃 Document » Footnote Properties… /Footnote\
Maximum Height Per Column:
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What have you for the Widows, Orphans & Keeps in the Body paras?
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FYI, I reset the Orphan/Widow settings for my body tags (plural) and the problem mysteriously disappeared.
Which was odd, because the gap occurred on multiple pages. And sometimes the gap was 4 or 5 inches. Just a para or two, huge amounts of blank space, then a footnote. Massive amounts of room for more para or body tags.
I would have followed up on this back when I was a pro tech writer, partly out of curiousity and partly because testing Frame was part of my job. Best I can figure, one tag was thinking "keep with next" and so was the next tag, and the next and the next and the next.
But now that I'm retired and writing the Great American Novel, I simply accepted the miraculous disappearance of the problem and went back to writing. Not going to investigate that and make sure. Just guessing. Your priorities can change as you age. Testing or redesigning software like Frame or Scrivner is a ton of fun and very interesting. But that's not the most important thing to me right now. Writing and editing is.
Thanks for the help! It did get me checking my header/footer settings which solved the problem. So... hooray! It's gone!
Somehow.....