footnote placement

[Graeme R Forbes]

Been a while since we had one of these, this one from Chris Seal:

"Sometimes a footnote reference in text is on one page but the footnote is on 
the following page.  From an editorial viewpoint is it OK to have a footnote on 
the page following the in-text reference? 
If not OK, how do I get FrameMaker to ensure the footnote is on the same 
page as its reference?"

Chris: It's not ok if there's enough room at the bottom of the page to fit the first 
two or three lines of the note (some would say the first line). And, there is no 
automatic way of getting FrameMaker to break notes correctly. There is a 
manual method, which I describe below.

I think it's now safe to assume that this flaw in FM will never be fixed. One of 
the few pluses in my being forced to leave FM (i'm on a Mac) is that I leave this 
mess behind.

Graeme Forbes

****************
Part II To make footnotes break correctly across (one-column) pages:

The Workaround

Write your document in the normal way, using Frame's footnoting, and ignore 
problem footnotes. Then when you have done everything you have to do that 
could affect page-breaks (including generating a bibliography, if you use 
Endnote or similar), save a new version ("doc.fixed") and in it do nothing but fix 
the footnotes and print the public version. Go thro' your document (use 
Find/Replace with Find set to "Footnote") and see if you have any notes whose 
text is on the wrong page, and if there are some, see if you can reposition their 
numbers in the body text, or otherwise edit the note, so that the text jumps 
back to the correct page (a very slight adjustment in line-spacing may do it). If 
this can't be done for some note, then if there are no other notes on the page 
that the text of your note has been pushed onto, do (A), and if there are other 
notes on this page, do (B).

(A) Find out how much of the note will fit onto the page it should be on. Do this 
by successive cutting and pasting of lines from the bottom of the note until it 
jumps back to the correct page (note that if you do two successive cuts with no 
paste in between you may have lost a chunk of the note's text, and FM lacks 
multiple undo; but you can go back to your original version to recover the lost 
text, since you're working on a copy, right?). Observe how much of the note 
you've cut (memory image!) and estimate how much space you'll need at the 
bottom of the following page for the rest of the note (the "rest of the note" is 
the smallest chunk you can cut off the bottom that makes the uncut part jump 
back to the right page). With the cursor in the line that will (you think) become 
the last body text line when the rest of the note is placed, insert an anchored 
frame (choose "below current line") that pushes all lower lines of body text onto 
the next page. Use the Properties dialog to get the anchored frame to have the 
dimensions and alignment you want. Within the anchored frame create a text 
frame of the right dimensions to hold the final segment of your note, and paste 
that segment into the text frame. (Draw the text frame without too much 
fussing, then use the Properties dialog to get it to be the right width and 
height.)

If you didn't guess right, you can select the anchored frame symbol and cut it 
from its current line, go up or down some lines as appropriate, and paste.

You may want space between the top of the text frame and the top of the 
anchored frame to allow for a separator rule, which you draw with the line tool.

The paragraph format of the text you've pasted into the text frame is probably 
"Body" and you'll have to change it to, say, "Footnote".

(B) If there are other notes on the page that contains the text of your note 
before you start cutting, then follow essentially the same procedure as (A), but 
instead of putting the anchored frame for the spillover in a line of body text, 
put it in the first line of the first note following the one you're working on. If 
you set the anchored frame position for "Top of Column" the frame you create 
will be directly above the note its anchor is in, it won't be at the top of the page. 
Apparently FM treats the space occupied by footnotes as its own column.


If you are unlucky, A or B may generate a new incorrectly positioned note - the 
space needed for the text of the last note now on the page after inserting the 
frame may not exist, resulting in the entire text of that note getting shifted 
onto the next page. So you have to create more frames and do more cutting and 
pasting.


One other irritant: if you are using right-justification, the last line of the part of 
a split note that's on the page with the body-text note-number may not reach 
the edge of the column. The best fix for this is to select the entire bottom line 
and apply spread to it, starting with 0.1% and increasing until you get the line to 
look justified. Probably 0.5% is as high as you'll have to go.