Footnote reference problem

Hi BarbT,

please post a screenshot of your case with invisible characters showing.
Select the missing character, inspect the Info panel and provide the Unicode code point of the character.

Also provide the name of the font.

Is the corresponding footnote's text missing?

Did you import text with footnotes from a Word file?

What's your version of InDesign and operating system?

Thanks,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Did you ever find a solution? I am having same problem with Indd 2020.

Check what Unicode that character is. If it is U+FFFE, then this is a long-standing import error by InDesign.

ovidiub47969792  wrote The other problem is that because the footnote reference is 'missing' or 'unknown', the text at the bottom of the page it jumps to another footnote number and makes a mess down there.

That would indeed be another symptom. Instead of that footnote, InDesign inserted a dummy character, and the correct footnote text goes into the next one -- all the way up to the end.

You forgot to mention what version of ID you are working with, but it must be a pretty old one. I think the footnote import problems disappeared around the first CC (2014 or so).

If you don't have a modern InDesign, you can pretty much throw away your current document and see what happens when importing it again. Sometimes this error is a fluke and the next time around it goes well. Other times you need to open the original document and save-as-new using Word (just like an InDesign document, the contents of a docx file can get messy), or save-as RTF, which also works sometimes.

Those 3 or 4 "sometimes" before you even can know if any of those fixes work have always bothered me, so in my old workflow I always converted all footnotes to endnotes, imported the text into InDesign, and then converted the endnotes back to footnotes.

Hi ovidiub47969792 ,

is this issue really about a missing font, only?

Your footnote's text for that particular footnote will be missing.

How about other footnote reference numbers?

How are they formatted? With a different font?

Why do they work if they are formatted all the same?

Regards,
Uwe

its about missing fonts, just go to type > find fonts and replace it with something else.

also it might a glyphs.

Hi ovidiub47969792:

Did you get this figured out yet? There's a lot going on with this question, so are you able to share a page or two of the file that has these issues so that I can take a look? You can put it on dropbox or other file sharing drive and post a link here (public) or hover over my name above and message me directly (private).

~Barb