Why are footnotes appearing outside the margin?

[Jody Bilyeu]

I'm dealing with a long document--my dissertation--and certain footnotes are
appearing and printing below the margins, even tangling with the page number.
This seems to happen on pages with very long paragraphs or no paragraph
breaks.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Check the formatting of your text and footnote paragraphs to make sure
they're not formatted with an excess of "Keep lines together" and/or "Keep
with next."

 

[Jody Bilyeu]

Thank you for your response. I've got Widow/Orphan control only on both the
text and the footnotes. However, when I go back to check paragraph format on
the footnotes, it doesn't appear to retain my selections. All the checkboxes
are filled in with green squares.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If you can isolate a *small* sample of the problem, send it to me at
(e-mail address removed).

 

[Jody Bilyeu]

I don't believe I could sample it. But I fixed it. For posterity, here's what
I did:

First, I changed paragraph format on the footnotes from Space After: 0 to
Space After: 6 pts. (Increasing Space Before made it much worse.) That fixed
the tangling with the page numbers, and kept the footnotes out of the
margins. I don't know why, but it did. There were still some footnotes that
impinged into the margins, but the part that impinged was just cut off--you
just saw the top of the text. I fixed that by resetting the footnote
separators. I have no idea why that worked, but I had noticed the notes that
were having trouble were under the "continued" separator even though they
weren't continued. Weird.

For the record, this was on a very long document, 1200+ pages, with 600+
footnotes.

Anyway, thanks very much for your help.

Jody

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I would be inclined to treat the document as possibly corrupt or verging on
corruption. See http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm

 

[Jody Bilyeu]

Great. For the record, resetting the separators was all that was required.
All the paragraph settings are back where they were, and there are no
problems, so far. Maybe footnote separators are another place where
corruptions can hide. I'll experiment with the "save as web page" fix.

Thanks again,
Jody Bilyeu