Rule for cont'd footnote not working as expected

[roberte89093827]

See the attached screenshots. I've set my footnotes not to have a rule above them unless a note splits across a page (column). I occasionally have places, though, where a rule is appears a new footnote. I'm doing a lot of page reflow as I put layouts together for our typesetter, so I'm trying to figure out whether this is just ID's compositing software getting overheated (seems unlikely), or me not understanding footnote formatting as well as I should (almost certain.) Whatever help I can get is, as always, much appreciated.

Rob

P. S. Maybe once I'm retired and not having to pump out the work everyday, I can come on here more often to answer a few questions, but for now I owe all you guys.

[Barb Binder]

Hi Rob:

I'm not getting the same result. Rules are off for 1st footnote on page, and on for those that break. CC 2019.

If you think you found a bug, you can report it here: Adobe InDesign Feedback.

~Barb

[roberte89093827]

I'll fiddle with this - it seems intermittent. Once I've made sure I'm not missing something, I'll report the problem.

[Barb Binder]

Sounds good. I use footnotes every day but always have them appear—both before the first footnote and before breaking footnotes so I've never seen this happen.

~Barb

[roberte89093827]

Ok, I just took the entire text from the eight-page section and copied it into another eight pages. All footnotes are now behaving.

Originally poured in the text, styled paragraph by paragraph, including the footnotes one at a time, which caused pages to reflow over and over and over again. I think this just eventually caused the footnote ruling to short-circuit / buzz out. It isn't something I'm inclined to call a bug, though. Though I'd say it's not completely robust.

[Barb Binder]

Well, Rob, if it's a recomposition issue, you can do that with a (somewhat obscure) keyboard shortcut.

Recompose All Stories

Cmd+Opt+/

Ctrl+Alt+/

~Barb

[roberte89093827]

Barb,

Do I just put the cursor anywhere in the story to re-compose, select all the text in it, or . . . ? Doing either of these things and using cmd-opt-/ didn't get rid of the rogue rule. Selecting all text in the story, cutting and immediately re-pasting in place did. (I haven't yet tried toggling the footnote rule.)

Rob

[Barb Binder]

I don't think it matters where the cursor is, Rob E. The command forces InDesign to recompose all of the stories in the file.

~Barb

[Srishti Bali]

Hi Rob,

I would like to know if the steps suggested above worked for you, or the issue still persists.

Kindly update the discussion if you need further assistance with it.

Thanks,

Srishti

[roberte89093827]

Hi, Srishti.

I just tried toggling the footnote rule off and then back on again, and this worked. Just marked David's answer correct (and thank you, David!).

Re-composing the document didn't take care of the problem, though I'm not real familiar with the re-compose command and may have been doing something wrong. I saw no change at all on screen when I hit command-option-/.

Rob

[roberte89093827]

(And I apologize for my sometimes tardy replies to the help offered here. My mail client often puts Adobe mail in the trash, despite my repeated attempts to teach it not to.)

[David W. Goodrich · Accepted solution]

I've seen this fairly frequently but it goes away when I toggle the Footnote Rule on and off (or vice versa) in the Document Footnote Options.  This apparently gets the composition engine to re-check the status and fix it, at least in  my ID CS6.  Going through the menus got tiresome so I wrote a two-line JSX:

app.documents[0].footnoteOptions.continuingRuleOn = 0;

app.documents[0].footnoteOptions.continuingRuleOn = 1;

Good luck,

David