Footnote formatting issues

[Stef]

Hello,

Here's the Issue:
I have a question about two specific macros related to fixing problems with footnotes, and why they're not working.

To cut a long story short, I learned the hard way that, in Nisus, certain elements present in the style palette for the style called "Footnote"—such as the delimiter and the space between the delimiter and the footnote text—are actually not part of the style called "Footnote". Instead, it turns out that they are part of the footnote content. It took me a while to figure this out, but I finally turned to the web and found these two pages on the forums:

- "Imported Footnotes not showing default note text"
http://www.nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=5679

-Footnote Style not working correctly
http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=5704

It also turns out that when we make changes to the delimiter and/or the spacing between the delimiter and the footnote text, these changes are not applied to footnotes already present in the text (because they're not part of the style). I have a document of approximately 150 pages, with lots of notes, and am having to modify the styles; because of this particularity in Nisus, some of the changes to the footnotes are not being made.

To deal with this scenario, the first link above provides a macro by Nisus—"Note Delimiter Replace All.nwm"—which applies changes to the style retroactively. The page also provides another macro— "Fix Note Default text.nwm", contributed by a user—which purports to do the same thing.

I downloaded both, but the macro provided by Nisus is not entirely effective: it doesn't fix all the instances of the problems in my (quite long) document (with lots of footnotes). The macro provided by the user does not even run on my system. I receive the following error message: "There was an error on line 17 in the macro 'Fix_Note_Default_text'. Expected a Range object."

I've provided an example file in an attachment which reproduces the problem. The dimensions used in the footnote style are a bit of an exaggeration, but they show the problem clearly: note 1 is correctly formatted, but notes 2–9 won't follow this exact formatting. After running the Nisus macro, the first-line indentation of notes 2–9 remains problematic—the hanging indent won't remain consistent with the first-line indentation. Also, note 6 remains a real problem case.

And Here Are the Questions:
I'm wondering if anyone might be able to explain the following:

(1) Why won't the macro provided by Nisus fix the problem and format the footnote style consistently?

(2) Why does the user's macro not run and result in the the following error message: "There was an error on line 17 in the macro 'Fix_Note_Default_text'. Expected a Range object"?

(3) Is there a way to fix these problems?

I ask because, as you can imagine, with a large quantity of notes, it's pretty bewildering having style changes that won't apply themselves properly, and having to go through a long document, one note at a time.

Any help anyone might be able to offer would be greatly appreciated.

Stef

[Hamid]

Here is your file modified. Is this the result you are expecting?
If so, you don't need a macro.
1. Place the cursor anywhere in one footnote.
2. Position the indent marker on the ruler where you want it to be. This will move the footnote text of the footnote at cursor location to where you want it.
3. Leave the cursor where it is; then from the Format:Note Style menu, apply "Redefine Style from Selection". This will force the text of all the footnotes to follow the new style.
4. Check visually that all footnotes follow the same new style.
If a footnote does not follow the new style, it means that there is something applied manually to that footnote which overrides the new style.
5. When you place the cursor in any footnote text which does not follow the new style, you will find a ruler tag in the Statusbar at the bottom right of the document window.
6. Click the ruler tag in the Statusbar and from the contextual menu apply "Remove Ruler". This will make it follow the new style.

[Stef]

Thanks, Hamid, for your quick reply. Indeed, the examples in the document you kindly posted, as well as your instructions (especially steps 5–6), fix the issues.

I'm new to Nisus (though not to word processors), and I must admit that this idea of formatting attributes which "override" a style, and make it impossible to update a style, is new to me. In the document I attached, I couldn't always figure out precisely what was "overriding" the style, but I followed your instructions, especially points 5–6, and things fell into order.

Two points:
(1) I can't imagine what a Nisus user is supposed to do when s/he has a document with 400–500 pages, and has to tweak the styles. It must be fairly common for paragraphs to have attributes which "override" the basic style, so does one have to go through the whole document undoing style "overrides", and then redoing them, in order for the style changes to work? This seems less than efficient.

(2) Thanks for pointing out that you can indeed "Redefine Style from Selection" for the Footnote style, via the "Format > Note Style menu. In the "Styles" part of the Tools palette, this option is not available for the Footnote style—although it is for all the others—which made me think you couldn't do this with the Footnote style.

Please know that the help is appreciated.

Stef

[phspaelti]

Hello Stef, and welcome to Nisus.

I'm new to Nisus (though not to word processors), and I must admit that this idea of formatting attributes which "override" a style, and make it impossible to update a style, is new to me. In the document I attached, I couldn't always figure out precisely what was "overriding" the style, but I followed your instructions, especially points 5–6, and things fell into order.

Two points:
(1) I can't imagine what a Nisus user is supposed to do when s/he has a document with 400–500 pages, and has to tweak the styles. It must be fairly common for paragraphs to have attributes which "override" the basic style, so does one have to go through the whole document undoing style "overrides", and then redoing them, in order for the style changes to work? This seems less than efficient.

I am not really familiar with Word, but if I remember correctly 'everything' is a style, and if you apply some formatting, Word creates new styles on the fly (giving them names like 'myStyle + …').
In Nisus things work differently. In Nisus styles always stay as you define them, and you only get new styles if you take the trouble to make them yourself. Any formatting that you apply without the use of styles is 'free'. The different types of formatting are ordered hierarchically. The 'free' formatting has the highest priority, and this is what Hamid means by 'override'. This is quite sensible, since presumably you want this formatting to be visible, if you actually took the trouble to apply it. But for the same reason, you want to apply such formatting sparingly. If you want a well formatted document, you should probably use your defined paragraph and character styles as much as possible.
The 'free' formatting is easily recognisable as such in the status bar, where is shows up in the form of icons: an [a] for font and other character attributes, color 'wheels' for color, and a ruler icon for spacing and indentation. You can use the menus of these icons to quickly select all instances of the same formatting throughout your document. So that is one way to clean up any such styles that may be applied. Apart from this Nisus also has attribute based find/replace, and there are also macros that can help to collect such formatting.

(2) Thanks for pointing out that you can indeed "Redefine Style from Selection" for the Footnote style, via the "Format > Note Style menu. In the "Styles" part of the Tools palette, this option is not available for the Footnote style—although it is for all the others—which made me think you couldn't do this with the Footnote style.

I'm not the best authority on dealing with footnotes, but generally the footnote (and endnote) style shouldn't really be the way to format your footnotes. The purpose of these styles is for Nisus internal management of footnotes. Instead you should define one or more paragraph styles for your footnotes and apply them to keep your footnotes properly formatted.

[Stef]

Thanks indeed, Philip, for taking the time to provide these explanations. They are very helpful. In particular this one:

The 'free' formatting is easily recognisable as such in the status bar, where is shows up in the form of icons: an [a] for font and other character attributes

It helped me find the "Select All" command by clicking on the font icon on the status bar. I was thus able to select all instances of similarly, and freely, formatted words in a 150+ page document, and apply a character style to them in just a matter of seconds—rather than a matter of hours, which is what I thought it was going to take me. Nisus does indeed have some really powerful features!

Stef