Strange table footnote behaviour on landscape pages

[QuintinSeegers]

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:

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

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

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

[FrameMaker-dk]

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

[QuintinSeegers]

@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:

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

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

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

[Winfried Reng]

Hi,

How do you create your PDF?

With or without Distiller?

I guess that this might make a difference.

Best regards, Winfried

[QuintinSeegers]

@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]

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.

[QuintinSeegers]

@Jeff_Coatsworth Got that sorted :-). Just busy downloading update 7 because some of my add-ons don't work with update 8.

[QuintinSeegers]

After fixing my PDF printer issue, I still have the original issue with the table footnote text orientation.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Save As PDF and Publish to PDF both use the same new PDF rendering engine. You can try the older PDF generator by Printing to the Adobe PDF printer instance or flipping the "Use Distiller" flag in the Publish Settings for PDF.

[QuintinSeegers]

@Jeff_Coatsworth Interesting. I tried the Print to Adobe PDF printer instance, as you suggested, and it worked. The text is now oriented correctly: 

If select the "Use Distiller" option in the Publish settings, it's also oriented correctly. So it seems to be an issue with the new PDF rendering engine. I'll log a bug report for it and post the ticket number here.

[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.

[QuintinSeegers · Accepted solution]

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.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Good to hear that you figured it out. Thanks for reporting back.