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Hello,

I have a question about the way Nisus fills up the page with text—or, rather, the way it sometimes doesn't.

I'm working on a document of approximately 150 pages, with lots of footnotes, which are typeset at the bottom of each page. I'm finding that Nisus quite often leaves a lot of white space between the last line of body text on the page and the divider line directly above the page's first footnote. This looks unsightly, and it looks really unprofessional, too. It also hampers readability.

When properly typeset, surely the last line of the body text of the document's respective pages should lie at a more or less uniform distance from the divider lines above the footnotes.

I've included an example file with some dummy text which shows the problem I'm seeing in my working document. I have no idea why this happens, or how to ensure that the body text fills up the page in a uniform fashion, without leaving unsightly space at the bottom. The example text is all the more surprising because it is short, and the problem arises on the first page.

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

Stef

Does this appear any better on your machine?

Thanks again, Hamid, for your reply. Indeed, the document you provide shows up as it should on my machine, without extra (and ugly) white space below the body text and above the footnote divider line.

I've looked at the document you uploaded, and I can't tell how you made the changes, i.e., how you got rid of the white space and made it look better. So my question will then be obvious: what did you do that made such a big difference?! There must be a setting I'm missing, or a tweak to make? The example document was really short, but I have a much longer document with similar issues. What to do is probably self-evident to you, but, apologies, not to me!

Stef

Hi Stephen,

Here are some thoughts in addition to what has already been said.

If I'm not completely mistaken, the space is determined by the Multi-page Threshold and the vertical line size of the footnote(s). Changing either of these two will change the space.

In your case I would begin by giving the footnotes a uniform appearance.

I. Uniform appearance
If one footnote paragraph doesn't look like the rest of the footnotes (in your case the footnote number 6), it's because it has what I would call a different ruler value, for the lack of a better term.

To give all footnotes the same appearance, you can do this:

1. Place the cursor in a note which satisfies your aesthetic requirements
2. Copy the ruler (Edit menu > Copy > Copy Ruler).
3. Now press Cmd + A to select the footnote. Press Cmd + A again. This will select *all* footnotes in the document.
4. Now paste the ruler (Edit menu > Paste > Paste Ruler).

Your recalcitrant footnote number 6 should now have the same appearance as all the other footnotes in the document.

II. Change the vertical space line number
In order to reduce the space between the body text and the divider line, only one mouse click is needed to fix this for your whole document (at least for the file you uploaded).

A) Assuming you have already completed steps 1 to 4 above, place the cursor in a footnote and repeat step 3.
B) Use the floating Paragraph palette to change the vertical space line number from 1 to 0.9. This will immediately adjust the space to what you want. The "disadvantage", if any, is that the line space is now a tiny bit smaller than in the body text; but after all, these are footnotes and they should stand out and look different from the main text. III. You can also change the Multi-page Threshold
Go to Style Sheet View and select the Note Style "Footnote" in the left column.
Change the Multi-page Threshold. If you enter, for example, 35 pt or 1 pt (instead of 65 pt), the space will disappear.

The *last* page, however, may end up with a larger space than the rest, if there is not enough text on that page. This looks normal to me, because this is how I would expect a last page to look like.

If you don't want a large space before the last footnote, you could convert that note to an *endnote*. That way you gain full manual control of the space before the last footnote. You can have no space at all; or you can place the cursor after the last character of the body text and hit the return key once or multiple times to get the individual space you want.

Stef wrote:Thanks again, Hamid, for your reply. (…) what did you do that made such a big difference?!

He reduced the Hanging indent from 3.47 cm to 1.55 cm and reduced the vertical space line number from 13 to 12 pt. This reduced all spaces to normal, except on the last page where he may have cheated a little bit by adding some extra text to fill the page.

After you have fixed the spaces in your document, consider creating a new Nisus New File template reflecting your changes. Otherwise you may run into the same trouble again, if problematic settings remain in your Nisus New File.

_______
Þorvarður

Þorvarður is right: I reduced the hanging indent to follow note number 6 which you had manually set to 1.55 cm. That improved the appearance of the document, and I reduced the vertical space from 13 to 12 pt.
Based on your document, I created a long document of 157 pages with 513 footnotes to see how it would appear.
It seems that reducing the font size of the footnote text and reducing the hanging indent to 1 cm will further improve the appearance. Also, setting Multi-page Threshold in the Footnote style to 2 lines instead of 5 lines will make a difference. This is because I noticed in the long document that when some white space appeared between the last line of the body text and the divider line on a page, the following page began with the last two lines of the paragraph from that page which had a footnote reference with five lines of footnote text. There wasn't enough space on the page to include all the 7 lines of text on the same page (as required by the widow/orphan setting of the Normal style and 5 lines Multi-page Threshold of Footnote style).

A very big thanks to both Þorvarður and Hamid for taking the time to provide these very detailed, and very helpful, answers! Please know that it's appreciated.

I've been following Þorvarður's indications and tweaking some of the settings indicated. I'm currently working with paragraphs with "Fixed" line spacing and I have constraints concerning the number of words/characters per page, so it's not always possible to tweak the line-spacing setting.

In cases where a change to this particular paragraph attribute is a viable option, Þorvarður mentions that it's possible to tweak this setting in "points". This sounds like a good idea, but I can't see how to do this: the only options available for me seem to be "cm" and "lines". Neither of the boxes here will accept a dimension in "points". Unless, that is, I'm missing a tweak somewhere(?)

The setting that seems to make the biggest difference to this issue of extra white space at the bottom of the pages—especially when some of the other tweaks are not possible—is the Multi-page Threshold. As Hamid mentioned, bringing this down to "2 lines" instead of "5 lines" really helps a lot.

Once again, thanks for the very helpful feedback!

Stef


P.S. I admit that the notes in the example document I provided were a bit of a mess. Normally I would clear such things up, and I actually got them into that mess while trying to clean them up. However, I found that I couldn't clean them up, at least not in the way that I thought I should be able to, i.e., automatically, by tweaking the paragraph style. That same document was thus intended for the separate issue on footnotes; but, since it showed the exaggerated white space at the bottom of the page, I thought I'd just use it for the white-space issue, too. But, yes, I agree: the footnotes were a real mess!

Stef wrote:I'm currently working with paragraphs with "Fixed" line spacing and I have constraints concerning the number of words/characters per page, so it's not always possible to tweak the line-spacing setting.

In case it matters, when I mentioned line-spacing, I was referring to the footnotes, not the body text. The two can be dealt with independently.

In cases where a change to this particular paragraph attribute is a viable option, Þorvarður mentions that it's possible to tweak this setting in "points". This sounds like a good idea, but I can't see how to do this

Change "Multiple" to "Fixed"
… and lines will change to pt

Thanks once again, Þorvarður. That's all very clear.

But what about when you say this:

III. You can also change the Multi-page Threshold
Go to Style Sheet View and select the Note Style "Footnote" in the left column.
Change the Multi-page Threshold. If you enter, for example, 35 pt or 1 pt (instead of 65 pt), the space will disappear.

How do you manage to set the "Multi-page Threshold" setting for the footnotes in "points"? I can only seem to get it to work with the measurements of "cm" or "lines". For me, the two boxes next to the "Multi-page Threshold" setting won't accept anything but "cm" or "lines".

I know that there is an equivalent between cm & points—something like 1pt equaling 0.35136…mm or 0.37597…mm, depending on whether you're in the US or Europe. So, of course, any measurement in "cm" can be converted to "points". But it seems that the ability to set this measurement directly in "points" would be a good idea, allowing for more accuracy.

The User Guide (p. 192, Fig. 217) also shows a measurement in "points" for this particular setting. But if I enter a measurement directly in points in either of the boxes, it doesn't stick—i.e., Nisus goes back to "cm" or "lines", without converting the measurement entered in points. If, as in the the User Guide, I enter "65 pts' in the first box, it defaults to "65 cm". I must be missing something.

Stef

You can change the display of units of measurements from the View:Rulers menu. (Centimeters/Inches/Millimeters/Picas/Points).
Changing the Multi-page Threshold in the left column in the style sheet will make no difference for the kind of document with the length of the footnotes in your sample document.

Thanks again, Hamid. I didn't think that changing the measurement units in the general Ruler settings would affect the "Multi-page Threshold" measurement units, because the "Paragraph Spacing" measurement units appear in "points" even when the Ruler measurement units are set to cm. Anyway, this is good to know.

If I may, I have one question about what you've just written. When you say the following:

Changing the Multi-page Threshold in the left column in the style sheet will make no difference for the kind of document with the length of the footnotes in your sample document.

what exactly do you mean? In other words, for what type of footnotes would changing the Multi-page Threshold in the left column in the style sheet actually make a difference? Perhaps for very long footnotes? But I can't figure out why.

Stef

In the style sheet, the right column of Multi-page Threshold is meant for notes which are more than one line long and which start on a new line. Here, the minimum you can set is 2 lines. A single footnote which is less than the number of lines specified in this column will not be split between pages. If you enter '1' in this column, it will not be accepted. Naturally, a note which is one line long and which starts on a new line will not have to be split between pages because it fits perfectly on one line.

The left column of Multi-page Threshold allows you to set the length for footnotes in units of measurement which can be one line (or more) or shorter than a line, the default setting (in Nisus New File) being 2.3 cm. or 65 pt. (you can view this in cm. or pt. according the ruler setting in the View menu). In your sample document one line is 16 cm.
The default setting of 2.3 cm. means that a single footnote shorter than 2.3 cm. will not be split between pages. Why a note which is just 2.3 cm. long would have to be split between pages when one line is 16 cm.? This is because NWP allows you to place multiple notes on the same line. When a note is shorter than a line, the Multi-page Threshold can no longer be expressed in terms of lines but units of measurement.

Here is an artificial example of an apparatus criticus where seven notes are placed on two lines; we do not want the last note (number 7) which is about 2.5 cm. to be split between pages should there be a little more length taken up by the other six notes, so we enter 2.5 cm. in the left column:

Once again, Hamid, thank you indeed. Your answer is very clear and very helpful. I think it could even be added to the User's Guide, because the explanations provided by the User's Guide are a little light on detail concerning this particular point (p. 192). In particular, I was puzzling over the Multi-page Threshold, left-column default value of 2.3 cm; now all is clear!
Stef

Stef wrote:Once again, Hamid, thank you indeed. Your answer is very clear and very helpful. I think it could even be added to the User's Guide, because the explanations provided by the User's Guide are a little light on detail concerning this particular point (p. 192). In particular, I was puzzling over the Multi-page Threshold, left-column default value of 2.3 cm; now all is clear!
Stef

+1 for adding something similar to the User's Guide.