Paragraph length and footnotes

[david]

I am writing a longish document - 70 pages. I have used
the normal template supplied by MS and did not add any
fancy styles. I have a serious formatting issue:

In my document I am using footnotes which are displayed
on the same page as the items they refer to - my
footnotes have different lengths. Now when I look at my
document in print layout view the following happens: Some
paragraphs write the text all the way to the dividing
line between main text and footnotes - meaning there is
no space between the last line of the paragraph and the
dividing line. But this does not happen everywhere;
sometimes there are 3 or 4 lines missing above the
dividing line (paragraphs is broken too early onto new
page). I have not inserted any manual page breaks.

It does not look very professional so I was wondering if
anybody knows how to remedy this?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There are ways to improve the situation but no way to completely cure it.
You have to understand what's going on here:

1. There is an absolute limit to how much text Word can put on a page. This
is set by your margin settings.

2. In order to completely fill any page with text (even one without
footnotes), you have to jettison some of Word's niceties. For example:

(a) "Widow/Orphan control" (Format | Paragraph | Line and Page Breaks),
which is on by default in all Word styles, prevents a single line of a
paragraph from appearing on a page. This means that any given page can be at
least one line shorter than another because a single line moves to the next
page. If a paragraph is three lines long and there's room for only two, the
entire paragraph will move to the next page. If the paragraphs are
double-spaced, multiply this behavior by two. You can see that this will
cause a lot of variation.

(b) "Keep with next," which is enabled by default in heading styles.
Surely you don't want a heading stranded at the bottom of a page. But if it
would be the last line on the page, or if there is room for only one line of
text below it (or two lines of a three-line paragraph), then there go the
heading and up to two lines of text from one page to the next.

3. Adding footnotes complicates the situation further because Word has to
allow room for the footnote separator and associated space, plus try to
squeeze the footnote in. If the footnote reference is close to the bottom of
the page, there may not be room for both the line that contains the footnote
reference *and* the footnote separator and at least two lines of the
footnote. So the whole thing moves to the next page.

4. If either text paragraphs or footnotes are set to "Keep lines together,"
then the problem with definitely be exacerbated.

There are several possible approaches to a solution:

1. You can set the footnotes to appear "Below text" instead of at the bottom
of the page. But then your bottom margins will no longer be uniform.

2. You can abandon "Widow/Orphan control" and "Keep with next." I would
strongly discourage abandoning "Keep with next," but it's not at all unusual
to see printed books these days with widows galore. And definitely turn off
"Keep lines together" in footnotes.

3. You can set the vertical alignment (Layout tab of Page Setup) to
Justified, but you're almost certain to be dissatisfied with the results,
especially on short pages.

4. You can live with the inconsistency.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.mvps.org/word
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.