Long footnote leaves big gap on following page

[synecdoche]

I'm writing my dissertation in Nisus. On page 9 of the chapter I am working on, I have a long (~500 word) footnote. My supervisor's sure to tell me to cut it out, but for now, I'm trying to figure out another issue. On the page after this mammoth footnote, there is a big gap at the bottom of the page. When I click on it, it highlights the footer. If I try to delete it, though, nothing happens. I suspect the footnote is to blame, but I am not sure how to fix it. The footnote could be spread onto a second pages, and I am sure I have seen NWP do this automatically before, but it doesn't seem to want to for this one. Is there any easy way to fix this?

[martin]

You can control whether NWP splits footnotes between pages using the note style (in the Style Sheet view). You'll want to adjust the "multi-page threshold". You might want to save and reopen the file to ensure the setting takes; I believe there's an updating bug where the changed setting is not always obeyed.

As for those gaps, there's a variety of things that can silently produce them. The most immediate are before/after paragraph spacing, as well as paragraph options like "keep ¶ together" and "prevent widows/orphans". Also, if a footnote can't be fit on the same page as its reference, the line with the reference is forced to the following page. If you don't think any of these should affect your situation, would you send me the file using the menu Help > Send Feedback? That's the quickest way for us to figure out what's at work in your file. Thanks.

[synecdoche]

I'll send it along. The footnote is longer than the threshold I set in the style for footnotes, so I am not sure why this one is causing a problem in particular.

[martin]

Thanks for sending along your document.

The explanation here is actually simple: the footnote is not split between pages because it can happily fit on a single page. Put another way, NWP won't split a footnote, regardless of its length, unless the note text can't fit on the same page as the note reference. In your case the note reference occurs high up on the page, and the big footnote can completely fit beneath it. This is the intended behavior, though we do have a feature request filed that users should be able to limit the maximum height of the footnote area.

As for the unwanted gap: I'm not seeing that behavior, but let me check on some other test machines and get back to you.

[synecdoche]

Interesting... I will send along a screenshot of what it looks like on my computer, in case it helps.

[synecdoche]

We managed to figure it out. Sort of. I saved it, made a few changes in an effort to fix it, they didn't work, and so I reverted to the saved file and voila! no more gap.