Footnote placement again

[Lukas Pietsch]

Hi,

here's me again with another weird footnote placement problem. This is Word
2000, a >200 pages book.

I have a manual next-page section break, followed by a new chapter. The last
page before the section break is half filled, with one paragraph of body
text and two footnotes. The first paragraph after the section break is
Heading1 followed by body text.

What drives me crazy is that Word doesn't place the footnotes at the bottom
of the page where it should, but some 1.5 centimeters above it, for no
reason that I can see. It does this only on that one page immediately before
the section break. When I insert dummy text to fill the page up and have a
new page inserted, the footnotes go to the bottom of the page where they
belong. I also found that when I toggle the compatibility setting under
Options-Compatibility-"Footnote Layout like in Word 6.x/95/97", on *or* off,
the footnotes will temporarily move to the correct position - only to be
back to the wrong position the next time I scroll to that page!

I can replicate the problem at other similar section breaks in the same
document, but not so far in other documents based on the same template.

There's no issue with breaking footnotes across pages (both footnotes are
anchored in the paragraph on the same page); there's no headers or footers
or graphics or frames or anything anywhere nearby that could be interfering;
none of the paragraph styles has any space-before or space-after that could
be interfering - nothing at all that I can think of.

I'm at the end of my Latin. And that manuscript must be at the publisher's
by the end of this month, camera-ready! Help!!

Lukas

 

[Lukas Pietsch]

P.S. to my previous posting:

I've now ascertained that the unwanted extra space Word leaves below the
footnotes on the last page before a section break is always the same amount
as taken up by the footnotes themselves. Word appears to be doubling all the
space required for the footnotes.

How very very weird.

Lukas

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Make sure that the vertical alignment of the section is Top and not Center
or Justified. I think that's probably irrelevant, but I can recall having
run into this situation before, and it may have been that that was one of
the issues.

 

[Lukas Pietsch]

Make sure that the vertical alignment of the section is
Top and not Center or Justified. I think that's probably
irrelevant, but I can recall having run into this situation
before, and it may have been that that was one of the issues.

It's been "top" all along.

Actually, I was wrong about one thing, regarding that weird "compatibility
option": it's not that I toggle it on and off. Rather, I keep switching it
off, then the footnotes move to the right place, but when I save and re-open
the document the compatibility option always reverts to "on", and the
footnotes are in the wrong place again. So, it's definitely that
compatibility thingie that's at fault. But why does it keep switching itself
back to "on"?

Thanks, Suzanne, for your quick replies (as always). I'll buy you a drink
any time you come to Hamburg; two if you manage to solve this one.

Lukas

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

When I had options that kept obstinately resetting themselves (even after I
rebuilt the Word Data key in the Registry), I found that the culprit was a
malfunctioning add-in. If you're using any add-ins, you might try moving
them out of Word's Startup folder temporarily to see if this solves the
problem.

 

[Lukas Pietsch]

When I had options that kept obstinately resetting themselves
(even after I rebuilt the Word Data key in the Registry),
I found that the culprit was a malfunctioning add-in. If
you're using any add-ins, you might try moving them out of
Word's Startup folder temporarily to see if this solves the
problem.

No, there's no add-ins around. Only a global template with some macros of
mine, and that has no compatibility settings specified either. It's not even
auto-loaded on startup. And when I remove that, the behaviour is still the
same.

Also, I fail to see how the registry should have anything to do with the
compatibility settings. I was under the impression they are by-document
settings, so they shouldn't be stored anywhere but in the .doc file itself?

By the way, I think I've experienced the problem with this file on more than
one computer, so if there's any data corruption anywhere I'd guess it's in
the file, not in the registry.

Brrrr. I'd hate to have to re-build the whole document at this stage. So
many cross-references, so many bookmarks, so many sections with different
header/footer settings. So many things to go wrong. :-(

Lukas

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

True, the Compatibility Options should behave differently from the other
options; I hadn't accounted for that. Before you throw in the towel, see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm. I have used the HTML
roundtripping technique to rescue a document with complex formatting and
hundreds of XE fields, with no data or formatting lost.

 

[Lukas Pietsch]

[...] Before you throw in the towel, see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm.
I have used the HTML roundtripping technique to rescue
a document with complex formatting and hundreds of XE
fields, with no data or formatting lost.

Good grief. I tried saving to HTML, and all the tables have come out mangled
beyond recognition. There must have been serious document corruption. This
is really a blow, at this moment. :-(

Thanks anyway. I guess I'll have to tidy up this mess, manually, before I
can get back to the real editing work. That's the first time Word has let me
down this bad.

Lukas

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I have to confess that my HTML roundtrip was done in Word 97, before Word
got so HTML-crazy that all tables were designed with the Web in mind (auto
resizing being the most annoying result). It could be that that was part of
your problem.

[...] Before you throw in the towel, see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm.
I have used the HTML roundtripping technique to rescue
a document with complex formatting and hundreds of XE
fields, with no data or formatting lost.

Good grief. I tried saving to HTML, and all the tables have come out mangled
beyond recognition. There must have been serious document corruption. This
is really a blow, at this moment. :-(

Thanks anyway. I guess I'll have to tidy up this mess, manually, before I
can get back to the real editing work. That's the first time Word has let me
down this bad.

Lukas

 

[Lukas Pietsch]

I have to confess that my HTML roundtrip was done in Word 97,
before Word got so HTML-crazy that all tables were designed
with the Web in mind (auto resizing being the most annoying
result). It could be that that was part of your problem.

Well, in my case I guess it was really just an issue of Plain Old Data
Corruption (TM). Tables not just resizing but splitting up into several
bits, some in positional frames, some not... Nasty.

Well, I got over it, but it has cost me almost an entire working day...

Lukas

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'm sorry you had so much trouble, but it sounds as if some of your tables
might have inadvertently become wrapped; this is impossible if you work in
Normal view but all too easy if you work in Print Layout.