Footnotes and orphans and widows

[Petar Petrenko]

Hi,

As you can see from the image, footnotes does not follow orphan and widow rules. InDesign moves the line(s) with footnote reference together with the footnote on the next page.

Please, let us decide how many lines we can consider as orphans and widows -- not only 2.

[MikeTO]

I'm seeing the same thing, both the widow and orphan options don't work for split notes. I'd expect them to work but I'm unsure about the other Flow options.

The Start control isn't applicable. At first I thought Keep Paragraph Together might not be applicable but for a book with multiple paragraphs in a note it might be desirable. But Keep with Previous Paragraph doesn't make much sense in a footnote.

[NathanC]

Provided that my footnote body is >2 lines before it splits onto the next I'm seeing that the footnote text flow is updating to the Widow flow option similar to if I did this between two standard text frames on Windows, although it evidently doesn't touch the note reference/text body. The only situation where it doesn't do this is when the line count is 1 as what's shown in OP's screenshot. Disregarding notes If I were to setup two standard text frames, one containing a singular line which flows onto the next If I enable 'Prevent Widowed' nothing happens in this scenario either, I believe this would be a feature request.

Before Widowed:

After Widowed:

 

[MikeTO]

@NathanC I apologize, my test was flawed. I repeated the test now and I'm seeing what you're seeing and it works as advertised. I think I had flow control on in the body text, too, and that combined with the note marker position confused me as to what it was doing.

@Petar Petrenko It's hard to tell what is going on with your document because we can't see the top of the right frame and can't see the flow formatting for the body text. Could you share a test document?

[Petar Petrenko]

On 12/8/2023 at 3:58 PM, MikeTO said:

It's hard to tell what is going on with your document because we can't see the top of the right frame and can't see the flow formatting for the body text.

I don't it is so important the top of the right frame. The problem is with the footnote handling. It must be placed on the next page together with the text containing the footnote reference.

[MikeTO]

6 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

I don't it is so important the top of the right frame. The problem is with the footnote handling. It must be placed on the next page together with the text containing the footnote reference.

The top of the right frame is important because it will show the reference marker and how much text got moved to the next column.

There are some situations where any word processor or page layout program will need to split the reference marker and footnote or where a large gap will occur at the bottom of the first column so that the reference marker and footnote can be positioned together in the next column.

The flow formatting settings are important not just for the footnote but also for the body text containing the reference marker because the app has to use these in conjunction to decide whether to separate the reference marker and footnote. Without knowing all of this it's hard to know whether there's a problem or what the problem is. A test document would be helpful.

Cheers

[Petar Petrenko]

On 12/8/2023 at 3:43 PM, NathanC said:

Provided that my footnote body is >2 lines before it splits onto the next

My footnote body has only 2 lines and widow/orphan controls are both checked. In this case footnote must be shown on the next page because there is no room on the previous page. IMO this case must be considered as a bug not as a feature request.

 

5 hours ago, MikeTO said:

The top of the right frame is important because it will show the reference marker and how much text got moved to the next column.

Reference marker is shown on the bottom of the left page.

I can't show the top of the right page because I made some changes to the text to make room for the footnote after I started this topic. But, the bug must be corrected.