Thanks for catching that. I have deleted the link. If we see more of that from the original poster, we’ll have to remove them from the system.

You can press Ctrl-F to open/close the panel without losing your selection.

Oh, jeez, sorry, I should have read the OP more clearly.
Yes, it’s a PPD issue. So picking a printer that has a PPD that can actually print 11×17 should work. Or, Colleen mentioned, using Device Independent!

What you call “smudging” I see as a very repeatable software bug. The bug is probably either in the font or the printing RIP. It would not surprise me if the LuLu Premium Paperback quality books were imaged with a different software RIP, perhaps even in a different printing location. I haven’t seen a font printing bug like that since the early 90s. But it’s not random “smudging.”

Not sure what you mean by “assign 2 styles or more to their reference numbers”
Do you mean different footnotes should look different on the page?

And IDML doesn’t fix it? Wow.
Have you tried using the Layout > Pages > Move feature instead of dragging them?

You might be able to do it with a custom cross reference format: https://creativepro.com/watch_listen/creating-custom-cross-references-video

Have you read over the page number post here:
https://creativepro.com/how-to-add-page-numbers.php
and there are some other posts here:
https://creativepro.com/tag/page-numbers