Word inserting excess blank space in footnotes

[fleepish]

Hi all,

I'm trying to iron out formatting kinks in a 200-page academic text. Normal
formatting is a short separator followed by footnotes (default), which
usually works fine. However, every 10 pages or so, there's a whole-line
separator high up the page, with about 25 lines of blank space below it
before the footnotes start. I've tried everything I can think of, but I can't
get rid of this excess blank space. Any ideas?

Thanks,

fleepish

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The "whole line separator" would be the Footnote Continuation Separator, and
from your description it would appear to have acquired some undesirable
formatting. Switch to Normal view and View | Footnotes. On the toolbar,
click the button beside All Footnotes and choose Footnote Continuation
Separator. If you have nonprinting characters displayed, you may see a
string of paragraph marks (empty paragraphs), which you can delete. If it's
not that simple, right-click and choose Paragraph... and see if there is any
Space Below in the paragraph formatting; if so, remove it. Or you can
probably get around all this by just clicking the Reset button.