Save the footnotes

November 2, 2009 7:28 AM

Is there any way to solve Pages' funny behaviour with long footnotes?

For a variety of reasons, I prefer to use Pages to Microsoft Word. For the most part, I'm happy with the program, but it does have one bug(?) that's really irritating: it doesn't seem to know what to do with long footnotes.

What seems to happen is this: if a footnote is longer than the remaining space on a page, Pages breaks up the text so that the footnoted word (and its footnote) is on the next page. As a result, there's a significant chunk of white space at the bottom of the page before the footnote. I think what should happen is that the footnote should be split over two pages, but Pages seems to be incapable of doing this.

I've done some googling and asked on the Apple Support Forums but haven't had any luck solving this problem. The only other option seems to be to convert the footnotes to endnotes but I'd like to see if I can work things out and keep the footnotes as they are what I prefer to use for this particular document.

Does anybody here have any ideas of ways to fix it? (I have submitted a "suggestion" to Apple but I doubt this is likely to get fixed before the next version of Pages, if then.)

posted by synecdoche to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

This would be a really ugly hack, but you could add section breaks, before and after the location of the unruly footnote. This would let you manually place the footnote in the footer for that individual section, and format it however you like. If you want to spread it across two pages, you'll need three section breaks.
posted by roofus at 1:23 PM on November 4, 2009