^huh?

It’s in your footnote preferences. Go to your document footnote options. Then click the layout tab. Look down to where it says “first footnote in column.” Click that and the drop down menu will have the “continued footnotes.” Select that and can control the weight and length of the continuation of the footnote rule.

As Chris said back in April, it could be a font conflict. I’m not sure what font InDesign uses for it’s dialogue boxes, but if it conflicts with a font you are using for a job (either via suitcase or something, or document fonts folder) that could cause it.

But is the black rule only showing up where you want it? Or in all places?

The blue lines are only InDesign showing you the cell outlines. To get rid of that, I think you have to turn off show frame edges.

I had something similar, but instead of symbols and numbers, only certain symbols were used. It was a college handbook for this year’s courses (with teachers’s names, what class, class description, etc.) But certain professors had a footnote and it always had to stay the same. So one on page, it might be the asterisk, dagger, double dagger, etc. But let’s say the guy with the dagger foonote isn’t listed for a class two pages later. Then the page would have asterisk, double dagger. Or on another page, it might be dagger, double dagger (and no asterisk).

My only workaround (which was horrible) was making the callouts white, and typing the symbols and kerning them back over the whited out symbols. I had to do this for the callouts as well as the foonote symbols in the footnotes themselves.

It was a nightmare as the book was pretty big (900 pages). But I think only a few hundred required that kind of tweaking. Then in second pass they started moving things around and footnotes moved and…you guessed it…had to tweak those things again.

I gues we’ll be getting this book every year, so hopefully I can figure something out by next summer. It’s bad enough they give us a half-assed XML file (taken from their website) so actually it’s HTML converted to XML or something. And it’s full of those non-breaking spaces which HTML allows, but not XML. XML deletes those codes. So a bunch of text had no spaces between words.

So I had to open in Text Wrangler and do a ton of search and replaces.

But, I’m going off topic.

I agree with David that it can’t be done automatically with ID’s build-in footnote feature.

Not sure what you mean by “agnostic.” Do you mean a style sheet that only has an indent and nothing else?

From your pic—that’s four style sheets (and one full measure text box/master page).

The “Scope of…” would be one paragraph style with no indent.

The “Contrary to…(with no indent) would be another paragraph style

The “Orange type would be another paragraph style with no indent.

The “Contrary to…” would be another paragraph style with the left indent.

I see no reason to worry about a grid or adjusting the size of the text box, or object style.

It looks pretty basic to me. Or is there something else you’re looking for?

From the pic—just separate paragraph styles are needed (some with indents and some without).

Or you could have gone to “edit” and then “select all” and deleted that way. Or Apple + A (if on a Mac).