Footnotes disappear

[Johnnyyyy]

I'm having a lot of trouble with the new footnotes functionality:

- Placed text from a Microsoft Word document

- When formatting the footnotes they disappear (some text overflow issue).

I've tried using brand new paragraph settings, deleting old footnote styles, resetting notes to factory defaults, etc etc. 

Any help on how to solve this would be appreciated, (I don't feel like adding 50 footnotes manually

dof2022_4_v1.afpub

[GaryLearnTech]

Hi @Johnnyyyy I don't think it's quite as bad as you currently perceive.  Single-click that red eye icon and your footnote text will reappear.  Your text is overflowing the footnote text frame and is currently set to be hidden.

I've not played with the new feature yet, but I've got a couple of possible explanations.  You mentioned experimenting with paragraph styles - perhaps your most recent experiment made the text too large for the default frame, forcing it to be hidden.  This might be getting influenced by the text frame coming from a master page?

So, not a full explanation or solution, but hopefully that will allow you to make some progress…

[MikeTO]

Hi, there are a few other threads on footnote formatting issues with MS Word imports - character attributes are being applied on top of the styles. I think Word's footnote character style is being converted to character attributes on import. I imagine Serif has added this to their list.

In the meantime, click into a footnote and then right click the paragraph style in the Text Styles panel and choose Update <style name>, in your case Basic Paragraph 4. This will add the character attributes to the paragraph style and clear up that formatting issue. Then edit your paragraph style as required.

Re: the overset footnotes. As Gary said you can click the overset icon one by one to show the footnote text but you shouldn't have to do that, footnotes shouldn't be overset like this. When you see this happen it's due to the baseline grid settings and frame setup.

First, ensure your the position and width and height of your text frames on the masters are aligned to the baseline grid. Turn on View > Show Baseline Grid and align the frames on the masters.

Second, the frame on the right side of the master has an independent baseline grid. Select that frame and turn it off in the Text Frame panel.

When investigating this I reduced your document to a test file and below I'm showing (with and without Show Baseline Grid for clarity) that the left page's footnotes are positioned properly within the footnote frame but the footnote frame isn't at the bottom of the frame's column. The right page's footnotes are positioned incorrectly within the footnote frame and the footnote frame again isn't at the bottom of the frame's column. The footnote frames aren't at the bottom of their columns because the frames aren't aligned to the baseline grid and the right page is different due to the use of an independent baseline grid for that frame.

Good luck!

[Johnnyyyy]

Thanks so much for the quick and detailed reply! Totally overlooked the baseline grid issue, that seems to have solved the problems

 

[Johnnyyyy]

Everything seemed to be working fine, but then I got this weird other issue, if footnotes span to the next column they get huge. (it only happens if they span to the next column) If I click on the big text and try to reapply the normal size on the BIG text, the text on the previous column gets really small.

(Wanted to upload my original AFpub file, but it has gotten really big 140 MB (while only using linked files (?))

 

[MikeTO]

3 hours ago, Johnnyyyy said:

Everything seemed to be working fine, but then I got this weird other issue, if footnotes span to the next column they get huge. (it only happens if they span to the next column) If I click on the big text and try to reapply the normal size on the BIG text, the text on the previous column gets really small.

I've duplicated the "big footnote" issue and it's related to the old scaled text frame feature that confuses people to no end. Fortunately, this is easy to fix.

In the screenshot below, I drew two identical text frames. Then I scaled the right one larger by using the text scale handle (the extra one below and to the right of the bottom-right size handle). Then I scaled the right one back to the original size by using the bottom-right size handle. This has the effect of scaling any text in the frame. I typed some text into the left column and when it overset the frame I linked it to the right one. As you can see in this screenshot, the text that flowed into the right frame is scaled. Then with Allow Split Notes enabled, I started inserting a footnote...

...and when the footnote split into the second frame the footnote appeared scaled just like the regular text in the frame. So scaled text frames scale their footnotes, too. The workaround is to delete the text frame and replace it with a new one of the same size. You can't reset the text scaling factor, there is no way to know how much it is scaled. You could drag it to a smaller size with the scaling handle but there's no way to get it precisely back to 100% so just delete it and replace it with a new frame.

3 hours ago, Johnnyyyy said:

(Wanted to upload my original AFpub file, but it has gotten really big 140 MB (while only using linked files (?))

Try this. Open Window > Resource Manager. Select all images and make them embedded. When it's done make them all linked again. Save your file and check the size. This is just a temporary workaround if you've encountered a specific problem but if it works for you then you'll be able to shrink your files when you need to.

[Johnnyyyy]

Thanks so much mikeTO!  That worked!

[MikeTO]

Here's a test doc for the scaled footnote if you want to play with this

scaled footnote test.afpub