Orphaned footnote

[MikeTO]

I encountered two orphaned footnotes this week. They're invisible unless I search for their text and go to the result which shows the footnote frame outline. This sounds like the old invisible footnote issue but that was a fitting issue and the footnote was in the Layers panel. For this issue, the footnote isn't in the Layers panel and it doesn't have a note reference marker. I think the issue is two footnotes sharing the same note reference marker.

Orphaned Footnote 257.afpub

This test document has one note reference marker and an associated footnote with the text "Visible footnote". I saved the doc with the invisible footnote selected for convenience. You won't see the invisible footnote in the Layers panel but if you deselect it and want to select it again, search for the word "Invisible".

Delete the reference marker for the visible footnote. The invisible footnote will still be invisible. Save as a new file and re-open and the invisible footnote will be promoted to a frame on the page. (This is how I first found the issue, I must have deleted the note reference because I stumbled across text that used to be a footnote in a small text frame.)

Or if you open the document and covert all footnotes to endnotes, again nothing will appear to happen but if you save and re-open the invisible footnote will also be promoted to a frame on the page.

I tried resetting the footnotes to document-wide settings but that didn't make a difference.

You'll get the same results opening this document in 2.6 as in 2.5.

This is with a document I haven't edited for months and by comparing various backups it seems to have happened prior to 2.5, maybe with 2.4, so perhaps other fixes have already ensured nobody could create a document like this now. I don't know what I did to cause two footnotes to share the same marker but I copy a lot of text with note references. I copy a lot more text with sidenote references than footnote references and have never encountered this with them.

Edited February 3 by MikeTO
Added note about 2.6

[NathanC]

Hi @MikeTO,

I'm observing the same issue with your provided test document following your steps, so I'll log it with the developers for further investigation. 🙂

If you're able to identify what triggers these Invisible/orphaned notes to initially appear in the future, feel free to post back here and I'll update the original issue to add the recipe. 

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, NathanC said:

If you're able to identify what triggers these Invisible/orphaned notes to initially appear in the future, feel free to post back here and I'll update the original issue to add the recipe. 

Thanks. The only clue is possibly a red herring so don't read too much into this. For the second of these orphans I did more research and the orphan appeared to be the older version of another footnote that was still visible in the document. Possibly I edited or moved the footnote and somehow created the orphan while doing so. But my confidence in this is low and it doesn't help with understanding the steps.

This is a hard one to track down. The only way for me to find them is when they are promoted to a text frame on the document page so I could have other orphans in the same document and I just can't see them.

EDIT: I wondered if there were more of these so I searched for my footnote text style but didn't find any others. That's good news because this isn't prevalent then, but I rather wish there were more because it might show a pattern.

Edited February 4 by MikeTO