Inconsistent footnote spacing

[swimmer]

My document has many (40) footnotes over about 60 pages. On one single page
only, the 2 footnotes appear about 5 cm (2 inches) higher above the bottom
margin than on all the other pages with footnotes. (So there is too much
white space under the second footnote on this one page only.) I can't find
any extra paragraph markers, formatting space, or anything like that. I've
checked all the places mentioned in the threads posted for other footnote
problems -- can't see any reason for this one difference. Can anyone help???

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Is the footnote position set to "Bottom of page" or "Below text"? If the
latter, then it's the text rather than the footnotes that is ending short,
and for that, see http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/BottomLine.htm.

My document has many (40) footnotes over about 60 pages. On one single page
only, the 2 footnotes appear about 5 cm (2 inches) higher above the bottom
margin than on all the other pages with footnotes. (So there is too much
white space under the second footnote on this one page only.) I can't find
any extra paragraph markers, formatting space, or anything like that. I've
checked all the places mentioned in the threads posted for other footnote
problems -- can't see any reason for this one difference. Can anyone

help???

 

[swimmer]

All footnote positions are the same, "Bottom of page" -- the text above is
also formatted the same as in many other places that do not have the same
problem. It's only on this one page that the spacing is wrong. Any other
suggestions? Thanks.

 

[swimmer]

My second reply: I discovered that it has to do with the footnotes in a table
that appears on the next page. Word has (correctly) kept the footnotes for
the table on the same page as the table. If I allow the table to break across
the page (which I don't want), everything goes back to normal.
But I still don't see why the space has to be inserted below the footnotes
on the previous page. So I still have not solved the problem. The only
work-around I found so far is to insert additional hard returns following the
last paragraph on the misbehaving page, but I don't really want to do this.
Any thoughts? Thanks.

 

[Stefan Blom]

Footnotes within table cells can be tricky to deal with. Actually, it
will be easier to insert the notes manually, by typing numbers (or
inserting symbols) and formatting them as superscript. The note text
could then be placed in a border-less bottom row (whose cells are
merged).

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


in message

 

[swimmer]

Thanks but this does not seem like much of a solution -- more or less defeats
the purpose of having automatically numbered and formatted text. The
documents I work on are constantly being revised.... manually doing anything
would definitely be a step backwards! My own workaround is a much better
option in my view.
But thanks for responding.

 

[Stefan Blom]

What I suggested isn't a perfect solution, of course, but it works
rather well, assuming that the number of footnotes within the table is
relatively small. Also, note that table footnotes are usually positioned
below the table (not at the bottom of the page), and this cannot be done
automatically.

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


in message

 

[swimmer]

We place table footnotes at the bottom of the page, like all other footnotes.
As I said in my original question, I have a lot of footnotes in the document
many of which are in the tables. I still don't think your solution is very
good, but thanks for responding.

 

[Stefan Blom]

OK.

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


in message

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Stefan was describing the conventional treatment for table footnotes, which
is that (a) they're below the table, not at the bottom of the page, and (b)
they use a separate sequence (and usually different reference marks) from
the text footnotes. For tables containing mostly figures, it's conventional
to use lowercase letters for footnote reference marks. For tables with a
mixture of alphanumeric characters, usually the *, †, ‡, §, ¶ series is
used.