Blanks at bottom of page with columns, pictures and footnotes

[François C-R]

As a newbie, I'm having a problem with typesetting an article with footnotes. For no reason that I can see, the program leaves a largish blank area at the bottom of the column and continues the text on the next. How can I get it to fill the column down to the footnote area? Thanks for any help as I'm totally stuck!

Lemerre 2023-12-11.afpub

[Old Bruce]

Try setting the Pictures and their captions in Groups (as you have done for two of the three on the problem spread) then set the Text Wrap to Square instead of Jump. This is going to help because you have two column Text Frames.

Use the paragraph style you have made (or imported(?)) for the notes for the notes. Change the spacing on the Notes Panel to be much less than what you now have.

A few other tips. Base your various text styles on other text styles. As it stands now each of the Paragraph styles are unique. While there is nothing wrong with that it makes life difficult. I think most of the text has overrides applied. If they were based on Base and Base had Widows and Orphans turned on then they would just need to inherit/No Change instead of the current method where you have set that on explicitly for all the many styles and or you have overridden it.

Group your pictures and captions and set the text flow for that group. Currently one (at least) of the captions is in the body text. 

56 minutes ago, François C-R said:

As a newbie, I'm having a problem with typesetting an article with footnotes.

Start over with just a couple of pages of text. Just have a Heading, and a Body text Paragarph Styles. Then add some footnotes, make a footnote paragraph style and choose that with the Notes panel.

[François C-R]

Many thanks, that worked a treat..., though I can't see why! It seems that grouping the picture and its caption makes all the difference. I'll follow your advice about basing styles on one another too.

François

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, François C-R said:

Many thanks, that worked a treat..., though I can't see why! It seems that grouping the picture and its caption makes all the difference. I'll follow your advice about basing styles on one another too.

I use a similar 2-column layout with photos and captions in my history book but I don't group the photo and caption because it's unnecessary. The easier method is to type the caption in the main text as a paragraph after the photo, as you did in one case. Define the caption paragraph style with Flow > Keep With Previous Paragraph. That will "glue" the inline photo and caption together.

You can get fancy and define the a paragraph style for the photo and set Next Style to the photo caption style so that after you insert the photo can you press return and type the nicely formatted caption.

I use fixed leading but I set the leading for my photo style to Default and have baseline grid enabled so that the photo is always a multiple of the baseline grid.

I think you'll find this approach is easier than using a group because it's more automated.

[François C-R]

Thanks for the tip, I'll use it for my own work. However I am not the author of the material for this publication, I receive it as Word documents, though I have to indulge in a fair bit of post-processing before importing it!