Adobe FrameMaker 8: Footnotes

by Barbara Binder

 

You are writing in Adobe FrameMaker 8 and need to add the occasional reference. Seems straightforward enough. Just choose Special > Footnote and there you go. A footnote number immediately appears at the cursor position and the footnote itself appears at the bottom of the page. Better yet, if your Word document has footnotes, they will just come into FrameMaker when you import the file. But what if you don't like how they look? That's a little trickier because the controls are spread all over the program. Here are the four steps to footnote formatting:

1. Choose Format > Document > Footnote Properties
   
   
   
   This is where you can control the height allowed for a footnote on a single page, the paragraph tag assigned, and the look of the actual number. The default is to superscript the number in the text, but have it baseline-aligned in the reference and follow it with a period and a tab. Whatever you choose here changes all the footnotes in a document when you click Set.
   
   
2. Choose Format > Document > Numbering > Footnote tab
   
   
   
   You can control the numbering style here and, if you publish loose-leaf updates, definitely consider starting the numbering over on each page to simply your life.
   
   
3. Choose Format > Paragraphs > Designer
   
   Obviously, you need to make a stop here to set the typeface, size, style, etc.
   
   
   
   
4. Choose View > Reference  Pages > Reference
   
   
   
   And finally, visit the Reference pages to refine the footnote rule that appears above the first footnote on every page. You can adjust the rule, the frame, or both to globally update the division between the text and the footnotes.

Phew! That's a lot of stops on the footnote train, but... once you finish, all your footnotes should be looking pretty good. Unless, of course, they fall too far down on the page. In that case, you end up with the reference on one page and the footnote on the next. All I know to do is to start working with Pagination properties to force them back together. Come on, Adobe. It's the end of 2008! Can't you please fix this so that footnotes can break across pages like InDesign and Word have done for years?

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Want to learn more about Adobe FrameMaker 8? Attend Barb's Introduction to Adobe FrameMaker 8 class. All you need is a computer with fast Internet access, a headset and the current version of FrameMaker (the 30-day trial version of the software works fine). You can ask all the questions you like because all virtual classes are led by a live instructor--this is not pre-recorded content.

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About the author:

Barbara Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and was recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide for 2007.

Comments

[Jacqueline Le Bourhis]

Hello Barbara,

Do you know if it is possible to remove line breaks in the footnotes so the footnotes can appear in a single paragraph instead of separate paragraphs? I'd like to save space on each page (the book is heavily footnoted!) and format the footnotes so that each one is a “sentence”

Thank you for any suggestions or help you can provide.

Sincere regards,
jacqo
Ireland

[Barb Binder, ACI]

Hi Jacquo. No, as far as I know, the footnotes need to have the hard return at the end of each note. What if you run them as endnotes in the back of the document? That’s not an actual FrameMaker feature, so you could format them anyway you like.