Footnote text running onto next page

[SMG]

We run Word 2000. I have several users who have encountered this problem.
They are working on a document which has footnotes, they insert the footnote
only to discover that the text of the footnote is running onto the following
page instead of the entire text of the footnote appearing at the bottom of
the page where the footnote was inserted. We had the same problem in Word
97. Is there a setting in Word that we are missing which prevents this from
happening? Thank you.

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Following is a selection from my Word FAQ page at
http://www.allexperts.com/central/zebra.htm that you may find helpful:

Q: Why do my footnotes sometimes end up on a different page from their
references in the text? Or, I don't want my footnotes broken and continued
on the next page; I want the whole footnote on the same page. How do I do
that?

A: If you've ever tried to type (on a typewriter!) a page with footnotes,
you know how hard it is to figure out how much space to leave for them. If
you have a footnote reference in the very last line of a page, there will
not be room for an extra footnote, and both reference and note will have to
be carried to the next page. Or there may be room for the text reference and
part of the note, but the remainder of the note will have to be continued on
the next page. Sometimes it's hard to estimate how long the note will be,
too. Word has to make all these same calculations. Admittedly it makes them
a lot faster, but it's still a complex operation, and it's not surprising
that sometimes it doesn't turn out quite right.

Some users have reported footnotes wandering uncontrollably. This seems to
be an admitted bug in Word that results from the difficulty of calculating
where page breaks will fall, especially in a document with complex
formatting. To keep a footnote on the same page as its reference, the only
workaround that has been found (but it does reportedly work) is to format
the line spacing of the body text paragraphs (not the footnotes themselves)
to an Exact amount. As a reference point, Single line spacing is
approximately 120% of the nominal point size for most fonts (12 pts for
10-point Times New Roman, for example), so Double would be 240%, and so on.
If you are using Multiple line spacing (double, triple, or some fraction),
the extra space is added below the line. When you change to Exact line
spacing the same amount of space will be added above the line. This extra
space is not suppressed at the top of a page, so you may want to adjust your
top margin accordingly.

Keeping an entire footnote on the same page is somewhat easier but involves
esthetic considerations. You can set the "Keep lines together" property for
a given footnote paragraph or for the Footnote Text style, and this will
ensure that footnotes are not broken because the text reference and the
entire note will be carried tothe next page. But the previous page will end
short (very short if the footnote is very long), which may be even less
desirable than breaking the footnote. It's up to you to decide.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft Word MVP
Words into Type
Fairhope, AL USA

SMG <sga...@rcdpc.com> wrote in message
news:_MVP4.246$yI1....@news.shore.net...

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

In microsoft.public.word.formatting.longdocs on Wed, 3 May 2000 09:25:46
-0400, "SMG" <sga...@rcdpc.com> wrote:

> We run Word 2000. I have several users who have encountered this problem.
> They are working on a document which has footnotes, they insert the footnote
> only to discover that the text of the footnote is running onto the following
> page instead of the entire text of the footnote appearing at the bottom of
> the page where the footnote was inserted. We had the same problem in Word
> 97. Is there a setting in Word that we are missing which prevents this from
> happening?

Nope: there's a setting in Word that Microsoft is missing that is "causing"
it to happen... It's a bug that aflicts Word 97 and above.

To overcome it, set the line height of your footnote text style to an
"Exactly" measurement.

A Word document is composed of multiple streams of text, called "stories"
(they were running out of names...). Word has 13 of them. The footnotes
are one.

The stories are sized independently during pagination: by the time Word gets
around to sizing the footnotes, it has forgotten where the text is. By
specifying an exact line height, we seem to cause Word to take a different
path through its code and not make that mistake.

Hope this helps.

Please post follow-up questions to the newsgroup so that all may follow the thread.

John McGhie <jo...@mcghie-information.com.au>
Consultant Technical Writer
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Sydney, Australia (GMT +10 hrs) +61 (04) 1209 1410