Strange behavior of footnote in introduction or main title

Question

A user has added a footnote to the end of a main title (but I see the same behavior if the footnote is in an introductory paragraph.

When the layout is 1 column, the footnote appears at the bottom of the page. However, if the layout is changed to 2 column the footnote does not appear at the bottom of the page. This happens in both PTXprint and when using the Paratext Export as PDF. Does anyone know why this is happening?

Answer 1

Here are screenshots:

Two colomn with footnotes539×762 57 KB

Single column with footnotes564×745 62.2 KB

Answer 2

I can confirm that the transition from single-column to double-column text is losing track of notes. They do not seem to be lost in the transition from double-column to single-column. I’ve opened it as an issue on the issue tracker.

Answer 3

There is a fix committed that will appear in the next release, but I’m not sure it won’t still qualify as strange… The code as it was written in ages past (and now works) puts the footnotes before the transition to double column:

If this is not the desired output, please shout!

Answer 4

Our team would expect that all footnotes should go at the bottom of the page with the other footnotes. It looks very strange to have the introduction footnotes at the top of the page before the 2 column mode begins. The footnotes at the bottom of the page are already in single column mode, even when using 2 column mode for the body of the text.

Answer 5

@DavidGardner Could you clarify whether this is still the case for “normal” scripture, where it starts with an introduction in single column, and then switches to double column layout for the rest of the book. Surely in that case the footnotes from both the single and double columns would appear at the bottom of the page (as they have in the past).

I think the situation described above is a special/theoretical case where it goes from 1-col to 2-col and then BACK to 1-col all on the same page - in which case I would also expect it to do something strange [almost in retaliation for being so complicated!]

Answer 6

This is the case for normal scripture; without a day or 2 of coding there is the choice of vanished footnotes or mid-page footnotes (difference is 2 lines).
As far as I can tell, footnotes in introductory material (on the same page as scripture text) if they ever worked, vanished sometime before version 0.4. If someone has contrary evidence, that’d be very helpful to see.
Unfortunately our family holiday starts tomorrow, and I had a meeting this afternoon.

Answer 7

Going further back in history… I’m seeing this result (loss of footnotes from an introductory section header or introductory text, when followed by 2column text with a 1 page test file) as far back as the 2010 code MH added to github in May 2019. I guess introductory text footnotes notes aren’t very common? (Note that this is only going to affect the page on which the transition occurs, so if the introduction is multi-page the notes may survive. Equally, ‘chapter 1 on a new page’ will not trigger the bug.)