Word 2000 footnote problem: footnotes consistently too high (again)

[Lori]

Thanks to Susan and Stefan for trying to help me earlier with this.
I've been so incredibly busy that it took until now to make my way
through the suggestions in Susan's link below. Google wouldn't even
let me reply to the thread because more than a month had past. Sorry
for not responding before now.

Stefan, the footnotes were set to "bottom of page" from the very
beginning, so I doubt that was it. Susan, none of the things mentioned
on BottomLine.htm made any difference.

At one point I even deleted all the footnotes and then added them in
again. Same problem. If I remember correctly, everything was fine
until the other editor changed the whole document from 1.5 spacing to
single. It's far from an emergency, but if you (or anyone) have any
ideas about what the problem could be, I'd appreciate it!

Thanks,
Lori

This will move the white space from the bottom of the page to below the
text, where it may still be undesirably large. For some other
considerations, see http://home.zebra.net/~sbarnhill/BottomLine.htm

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There may be a clue in your description "a handful of short footnotes." If
the editor has put more than one footnote on a line, then this could be the
problem. Although this can be achieved in Word, Word still reserves just as
much space for the notes as if they had been stacked vertically.

 

[Lori]

Hi Suzanne,

There's plenty of space between the different footnotes. And the white
space is the same for all of them. If I pick some random place in the
doc and try to insert a new one, the same huge white space appears.
I've checked the style: there's no space before or after. Luckily this
wasn't a high-stakes document, so we decided to just live with it and
submitted it anyway. But it would still be nice to know what the
problem was in case it happens again.

Thanks again,
Lori

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I assume you also checked the line spacing of the Footnote Text style? And
the formatting of the Footnote Separator?

 

[Lori]

I'm not sure how to get at the separator; it has got its own paragraph
mark and is greyed out. It won't let me select it or click on ie. The
footnotetext line spacing is exactly 16pt, with 0 space before and
after.

I always work with visible text boundaries, and the box containing the
footnote is really big, the same size (way too big) for all the
footnotes. None of the footnotes are more than 3 lines long.

The body text stops well before its bottom boundary, and always with a
paragraph mark. I looked at the bodytext styles and unchecked all the
boxes in the "line and page breaks" dialogue: nothing makes a
difference.

What info could I provide that might help get to the bottom of this?
I'm really stumped!

Lori

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You access the footnote separator by choosing View | Footnotes in Normal
view; then select it from the dropdown list on the toolbar of the footnote
pane. Also check the vertical alignment of your page (Layout tab of Page
Setup) to make sure it is Top (though I doubt that's an issue). You say that
each page ends at the end of a paragraph, which suggests that there are
other issues; see http://home.zebra.net/~sbarnhill/BottomLine.htm

 

[Lori]

Suzanne, you rule! It is now fixed! I went into normal view, and
unchecked the widow/orphan box for all the footnote items. I'm not
sure which one was the culprit, but the footnotes are now behaving.
Thank you SO MUCH for sticking with me on this one.

Best wishes,
Lori