Note: error in the order of the searches

[Pyanepsion]

Hello everyone,

I used a ‘Bottom of the page’ paragraph style for the footnotes.

In the text, the automatic numbering of the notes is correct.

I wanted to copy all the notes in Notepad++ to transfer them back to another DTP. So I ran the search for the ‘Bottom of the page’ paragraph style to see the different occurrences.

Some notes are not displayed in the right order in the search window. For example, on page 44, I found hits 25, 24, then 26 when they are actually in the correct order at the bottom of page 44. It may be explained that this is due to that or to something else, but the fact remains that this malfunction could have caused major problems (or even forced me to pay for the damage) if I had not realized!

I did realize it, and it required far more attention than would have been necessary for such a routine task.

[walt.farrell]

Can you provide a sample document that illustrates this?

Also, a screenshot of the page with the Layers panel showing the footnotes' layer(s) might be useful.

[Old Bruce]

Perhaps the mis-numbering is caused by the order of creation, notes 24 and 25 were made then a new note was made between them that gets numbered 25 and (old) 25 gets renumbered 26.

[Pyanepsion]

It does not really matter what the cause is for the user. This change in the order of occurrence can have big financial consequences. Each note in the wrong place produces a mixture of all the notes on the page where it is located.

That said, the order in which the notes were created is apparently irrelevant. The notes were created in the order they arrived in Word. I have noticed, however, that when this malfunction occurs, there are apparently at least 3 or more footnotes per page.

[walt.farrell]

9 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

The notes were created in the order they arrived in Word.

Are you also saying that the Publisher document was originally created in Word?

That is an added complication, and analyzing it will probably require having both the Word document and the Publisher document.

[Pyanepsion]

The file was written in Word and then transferred to an ASCII editor: Notepad++ so that only the plain text was retained.

This raw text was pasted into Affinity Publisher and then formatted.

I cannot provide the file publicly for obvious reasons of confidentiality.

[MikeTO]

Are all the footnotes in the same frame on each page or are there multiple separate frames? If you're using more than one frame on the page, the layer order as Walt pointed out is key.

If I place two frames on a page and link them and put text with footnotes in both. If the Left one is above the Right one in the Layers panel, the Right footnotes will be found before the Left footnotes. Now this is backward from what you would want given we read from left to right. To correct this, I would need to place the Right one above the Left one.

I don't think this is a design flaw or bug because while many documents may be simple and there is just one linked story on each page, not all documents are this way. You might have two linked stories on the same page, each with their own footnotes that are numbered separately. Publisher can't be responsible for finding all of those in what the author considers to be the right order.

Adjust your layer stacking order and it will work the way you expect. Or use just a single frame with multiple columns and you won't experience any issues.

If you're using a single frame and the order is still wrong, please provide more information because that would be an interesting bug. 🙂 

[walt.farrell]

28 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

I cannot provide the file publicly for obvious reasons of confidentiality.

You might be able to provide a non-confidential sample that demonstrates the problem, though.

[Pyanepsion]

There is only one text frame per page except for a header frame at the top and a pagination frame at the bottom.

This bug does not occur all the time. In the attached file, I had to get to note 34 for the order to start messing up. See the note calls on page 43 and what this looks like in the layer stack on page 44.

Is it normal that in the search window, I mean ‘search window’, the order does not follow the order? Absolutely not, whatever the reason!

footnote-number.afpub

[MikeTO]

My apologies, my test was too simple. Publisher creates each footnote as a layer but the stack order of the layers is the order they were created in, not the order they are within the text. And of course this gets complicated when footnotes move from page to page as you edit the main text.

Unlike ordinary layers, you cannot change the order of footnote layers by dragging them in the Layers panel - Publisher won't let you drag them. However, you can reorder them with the Layers > Arrange commands so this is a bug. Publisher should either:

• Keep them in order automatically and not let you arrange them
• Or not keep them in order automatically and allow you to arrange them

Therefore, searching for footnotes by format is often going to return them out of order. Is this a bug? It feels like one to me.

Here's how you could do what you want without issues and in fact it's easier than the way you were doing it. After saving your document, go to the Layers panel menu and choose Convert Notes. Convert from Footnotes to Endnotes for the Entire Document. This will generate the endnotes at the end. You may have to autoflow the text onto more pages to see them all.

Copy and paste the endnotes into the other app you wanted to use. You'll see:

<NoteBegin>Note 1 text...
<NoteBegin>Note 2 text...
<NoteBegin>Note 3 text...

for each note.

Cheers