footnote placement

[Carlo Caballero ccaball@xxxxxxxx]

I had wanted to comment on this message a fortnight ago...

On Fri, 14 Mar 1997, Peter Evans wrote:
> >As to footnote placement. . . .
>
> Longer footnotes are more troublesome, but with two or three footnotes of
> one or two lines each, things go astray. By contrast, Xy 3 is flawless, as
> long as you don't try to combine footnotes with clever-clever but
> incompatible formatting by way of ≪NB≫ and ≪BB≫.
>

I wouldn't say "flawless." For three years I had put up with footnotes
that "vanished": once in a blue moon, the last footnote on a page would
not be run onto the next page or even appear at all; the footnote number
in the text would utterly lack a referent, though the next footnote would
appear with the right number. It was as if the footnote just dropped off
the bottom of the page. I was not deeply troubled by this problem because
it would occur about one time in a hundred. Each chapter of my
dissertation was about 75 pages with about 110 footnotes, and having to
past one in was not too horrible.

When I first noticed the problem (this is XyWrite 3.56), I called XyQuest.
Jim Jefferson worked hard to help me but was baffled. I let it go. Three
years later, having finished my dissertation, I had to change the margins,
etc., for the final document, so I reset PL. That solved the problem in
every instance. With the previous PL settings, XyWrite could not bring
itself to recompose the page radically enough to make the footnote fit, so
it just left the footnote out. I'd call that a flaw. But I'm delighted
that it's one you can get around.

Here were my original (problem-causing) settings:

FD=62
PL=56,58,55
TP=3
BT=0

WD and OF were left at their default ("0", which isn't really zero), and
BF proved to be irrelevant in solving the problem.

The only change needed to make things work is

PL=55,56,52

It's possible that some other intermediary values would also work. Has
anyone else lived with this difficulty as long as I have?

--Carlo Caballero