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• • May 13, 2010 at 11:10 pm #55698
    B. Barhana

    Participant

    I am doing the final layout of a three volume, 1500 pages long book of academic texts and it needs to be done in the next three weeks. I can't use this time to manually adjust the long footnotes so I have to let inDesign do it automatically, so that I can deal with images and subtitles and titles and drop caps etc… (yep! there are those as well) but I can't seem to align the footnotes to the baseline grid I created for this document (they are classic footnotes, at the bottom of the each column) and the result is horrific for a grid nut like me. The line that separates the footnotes from text is at a different distance at each column of every page. I searched in vain for someone who encountered this problem in forums and found no one! So it must be me. I must be doing something wrong. I tried virtually everything. Even when all the 'align all lines” is checked in all the styles I used they don't align to the baseline grid.

    Could anyone please help me?

  • May 14, 2010 at 4:34 am #55702
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Now that's odd. I never noticed it before, but it appears you are correct: Align to Grid simply does not work in footnotes!

    I have always thought the current way of adding Footnotes is a sort of dirty “hack” from the Adobe programmers. There are lots and lots of problems, such as not able to span or ignore columns, numbering is limited to the utmost basics, totally ignores text-wraps, etc. etc. etc. And, with CS5, it seems the programmers at Adobe got themself into even more problems with adding span-over and split-into column paragraphs (see elsewhere on this site for how big these problems are!).

    Join our select little club of academic book-makers, and complain: Improve Footnotes Please (use the link in that discussion to send a formal Feature Request to Adobe).

    As for your problem … All you can do is set the leading of the footnote text to exactly your baseline grid distance, and make sure the Minimum Space Before and all other dimensions are also in baseline grid distances.

    (I'm fairly sure you made your default text frames already an exact multiple of baselines, so working bottom-up should not be a problem.)

  • May 14, 2010 at 5:04 am #55703
    B. Barhana

    Participant

    Thank you Jongware. First of all I'm glad that it is not me but inDesign. The thing is whenever I tell someone that I “loooove” inDesign (which I do, honest, especially after using quark for so long before and who remembers what else even before that) next day surely enough, something like this in inDesign hits me and I go ghrrrr! again. Anyways, I'll definitely use the link and show them how ungrateful I am :) and I'm going to do what you suggest, it should be fairly simple even though not as simple as clicking the align to grid button :))

    Thanks again,

    Bilge

  • May 14, 2010 at 6:33 am #55704
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    It's amazing, we're already only 2 or 3 weeks into CS5 and I've heard more and more and more complaints about lack of footnote functionality.

    Makes you wonder.

  • May 19, 2010 at 2:03 am #55749
    donkeyB

    Participant

    I had this problem with my assignment , too but at that time, I hadn't read this topic yet. You know, it took me a lot of time to fix it and the result was nothing. Therefore, my assignment got an C minus:((

    _____________________________

    Software Development Company

  • May 19, 2010 at 7:45 am #55753
    John McKercher

    Member

    I'm not quite sure why you would want your footnotes tied to the baseline grid anyways. Aren't your footnotes smaller in size than your main text and therefore would you not want the leading of the footnotes to be tighter than the normal text? That's the way I've always done it. It is a pain to get them to align properly to the bottom of the page, I agree, but I wouldn't tie them to the grid.

    Just a thought…

  • May 20, 2010 at 3:36 am #55778
    B. Barhana

    Participant

    Yes, indeed my footnotes are smaller than my main text (not so much as they would look sparse when aligned to the same grid as the text) but I separate footnotes from the main text by a column-long line. I want that line to be right in the middle of the empty space between the main text and the footnotes; and I want that space to be exactly the same height in each and every column. I don't want it to change depending on the length of the both texts. If I leave the footnotes to their own devices and don't align them to the same baseline as the body text (either by a command or the way Jongware suggested) than that is what happens and the line is at a random place each time as well. Am I making any sense?

  • May 20, 2010 at 8:19 am #55785
    Rebecca Evans

    Member

    Be warned . . . I've seen InDesign's automated footnotes reflow without warning, which bumped text, which cascaded through the entire book, which screwed up the index. Be sure to check double-double check your final pages to make sure all footnotes are as they should be.

    Rebecca

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