Footnote text brought in from Word is superscript

[M Black]

I have tried everything, but I can't get the import from Word to work. Word now seems to do a combined style for footnote text paragraph style and footnote reference character stye. When imported this results in all the footnote text having the footnote reference character style embedded so that all the text is superscript.

I have tried creating my own style in Word which is just a paragraph style, and replacing the Footnote text style, but when it's imported into Publisher it has the footnote reference character style. It seems to have secretly kept the character style and I can't seem to get away from it. Creating my own style in Publisher doesn't seem to work either.

Has anybody found a solution for this that works?

[MikeTO]

Word applies the Footnote Text paragraph style to the footnote, including the note number. Word also applies the Footnote Reference character style to the note number in the main text and to the note number in the footnote. Publisher works the same except that it can apply separate character styles to the note numbers in the main text and footnote, so there's no conflict. There are a couple of bugs in Publisher's importing of Word footnotes. There have been other reports of this so I decided to test it out today, here's my test file.

footnote test.docx

Issue 1 - the wrong styles and attributes were applied to the footnote. After importing, the entire footnote, including the note number and note body had the Footnote Reference character style applied to it when it should just have been applied to the note number. It also had a character attribute of 10pt applied to the entire footnote, overriding the style which was defined as 10pt.

Issue 2 - the styles were not faithfully imported. In Word I defined Footnote Text as Caslon 18pt Italic Orange but the text size was set to 10pt after importing. I defined Footnote Reference, which was based on Footnote Text, as Underline in addition to the default Superscript. It imported without being based on anything and arrived as 12pt, but was otherwise okay.

Word vs. Publisher

 

To fix this in Publisher after importing, I redefined the styles to match Word - I changed the font size for Footnote Text, based Footnote Reference on Footnote Text, and removed the size from Footnote Reference.

Then using the Notes panel, I clicked the Footnotes and Custom buttons near the top of the panel and then and set these options.

• In Main Text > Number Style = Footnote Reference
• In Note Body > Number Style = Footnote Reference
• In Note Body > Note Body Style = Footnote Text

There's probably an easier way to do this but I found it more straightforward to then insert a temporary footnote. Once satisfied with that, I chose Update Document Settings from Selected Footnotes.

But even doing that didn't remove the Footnote Reference character style from the imported footnotes. I solved that by then searching for the combination of Footnote Text and Footnote Reference styles and replacing them with Footnote Text (because that's what you want) and No Style (from the Character style list). After clicking Replace All my test document was perfect.

Hopefully there's an easier way to do this but it worked for me. Good luck!

 

 

[M Black]

I  did find at one stage that I could get rid of the superscript by putting in No Style for character, but that is no use to me at all because what I have here is an academic paper with footnotes full of italics and small caps. All of these styles disappeared when I did that Find and Replace. with No Style.

Actually, so that I could see what was happening, I made my new footnote style green, and the footnote reference orange. What happened when I did a find for Footnote reference + Footnote text, and replaced with my NewFootnote text was that  all the text went orange, because it was still hanging onto the Footnote Reference superscript style. My style was just a plain paragraph style, but it decided to hang onto the character style all by itself.

It's a big problem for me, and I hope it will get fixed soon. The last thing I want is to have to go back to Adobe InDesign. But I really need the footnote/endnote thing to work.

Microsoft Word is really making things difficult. I don't think they did it like this years ago with double styles.

[M Black]

I did another wee test with an italic style, a bold style, and more text with italic just applied, and more with bold applied. All with the same paragraph style.

So I did a Find for the paragraph style, and replaced it with the same paragraph style and Character No Style. 

All the italics and bold were wiped out, even the ones which didn't have a style. Surely only the STYLE should have been wiped, not the local formatting.

[MikeTO]

4 hours ago, M Black said:

I did another wee test with an italic style, a bold style, and more text with italic just applied, and more with bold applied. All with the same paragraph style.

So I did a Find for the paragraph style, and replaced it with the same paragraph style and Character No Style. 

All the italics and bold were wiped out, even the ones which didn't have a style. Surely only the STYLE should have been wiped, not the local formatting.

That's not how it works. If you apply a paragraph style to a paragraph, it will replace any individual character attributes while retaining any applied character styles. Find and Replace works the same way. So the moral of the story is avoid individual character attributes and stick to styles.

[M Black]

Since the "no character Styles" is the only thing that seems to get rid of the superscript in the footnotes, I was hoping that maybe if no styles were applied to the footnotes, the italic might remain. But then I remembered that this is why I always apply character styles in Word before importing, so that when a paragraph style is applied, I don't lose italics etc. But unfortunately for footnotes/endnotes, this doesn't work. So it just needs to get fixed. But I'm not sure how that can happen since Word has this weird way of working.

[MikeTO]

I'm just bumping this report which may have been overlooked. There's a test document attached to this reply.