Re: footnote placement

[Intekom2080 joni@xxxxxxxx]

I think the footnote placement problem stems from the minumum number
of lines of text allowed on a page with the PL statement (Xy3, now
BT statement with Xy4).

I have been editing and printing the South African Journal of
Economic History with XyWrite3 & 4 since 1986 and (as far as I know)
have never had footnotes misbehaving. This is after over a million
words, 123 articles and something in the order of 5000 footnotes. Some
articles have had up to 200 footnotes up to 3/4 of a page long.

My Xy3 PT setting is 51,53,10
The Xy4 BT setting is 14,17,15,42 (lines as the unit of measurement)

The strange paper size is a requirement of my printer who scales a
3/4 size A4 camera-ready page down to A5.

A brief flirtation with Corel Ventura 5 a couple of years ago (using
XyWrite 4 as the editor) showed up random phantom and missing footnotes.
Now I am back with XyWrite 4 despite its HYPHENATION BUG which nobody on
this list seems to have encountered.

Regards
Jon Inggs

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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
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Jon Inggs
Economics Dept
University of South Africa

e-Mail: inggsej@xxxxxxxx