Re: footnote placement

[Ed Cray cray@xxxxxxxx]

In 1988, I set up XY 3.52, then went to 3.57 (preparing for the year
2000). My defaults have never changed, pl=58,62,54 and I left the widows
and orphans alone.

I have written four books with this set up, two of which had multiple
footnotes. Occasionally there was a problem caused by the widow-orphan
default, but even when I was running multiple forms of footnotes, I was
happy.

The one problem I did encounter -- can anyone suggest why -- is that I
could not force a page break (PG) if I was less than three lines above
that on which the "normal" page break would fall.

It would print regularly, 1, 2, 3, etc., then start on my forced page
break, print three lines, say, then go to page 5, leaving most of 4 blank.

I have never figured this out, but since I rarely insert tables, or
tabular material, and don't often need a forced page break, I can live
with it.

On the other hand, if someone has a SIMPLE solution -- I don't write code,
I don't want to learn, and I refuse to give up my trusted 3.57 -- let me
know.

Ed Cray



On Sat, 29 Mar 1997, Carlo Caballero wrote:

> 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
>
>
>