Pagination and blank space with long footnotes

Question

We are producing a study Bible NT with lots of long footnotes. As PTXPrint carves up the page real estate between the main text and the footnotes (which I recognize is quite a complex process),  I am sometimes getting a lot of white space at the tail end of the main text on a page which COULD be filled with either more main text from the following page OR by the remainder of a long footnote which has overflowed onto the following page. In fact, the footnote algorithm doesn't seem to realize it can use the space for either and just leaves it blank. By a process of elimination, I have established that the problem is with the footnote and not the main text (e.g. avoiding an orphan line). In the example below, there is 4 lines of blank space to fill on page 4. There are 14 lines of  main text (temporary green text) available on page 5 which could fill it (without additional paragraph breaks or footnotes or other things which would force this text to a new page) and there are 9 lines of additional footnote text on page 5 which overflowed from the 1:21 footnote on page 4 which could also fill it. But neither does so. If I make the footnote about half as long that solves the problem and  both the main text and the footnote text each fill about half of the blank space. In other words, if a footnote is too long, something gets thrown off. That doesn't seem normal. Any thoughts? 

Answer 1

I'm just glad that footnotes are actually breaking for you, that's progress! Oh, actually, you're in single column mode, so that might have been an earlier fix... Are you running a recent version? (the last footnote changes relevant for this were fixed in early March this year). If not, please update!
If the problem is still there with a recent version, carry on reading.

So, there are several things that might be happening, and the only way to actually tell for certain is to spend about half a day reading lots of cryptic log files with the source code open beside you...
But, I can make a guess or 2....

You'll see that it is including the line needing the footnote, and then stops. So... for some reason it decided, having read the footnote, that the page was now full if it split the footnote where it did.  It can make that decision in 2 different places: while reading the input or while laying up the text. If it made the decision while reading the input then there's no more input available to the 'laying up text' bit, and so you'll get gaps. 
If the problem was in the second half, then... urm... I probably got some maths wrong somewhere in the code. It might also be that having placed the footnote, for some reason it decided that the ideal place to break the page was immediately after for some other reason.

I hope you don't have anything trying to alter footnote behaviour in your ptxprint-mods.tex file. If you do, please comment them out. I also hope that you're feeling brave... have a look at the Full view "Advanced" Tab, find "Show TeXpert hacks",on the bottom right:

and then go to the new tab that opens. Then there are some controls for you to play with:

*  "Enhanced paragraphed footnotes"  May help, I'm not sure. It's a "do things the old way" compatability flag, and I  seem to remember it makes some minor changes to non-paragraphed footnotes too.
* Reducing the "Last note interline penalty" will tell the code that it's allowed to break the footnote in more places. (10000 should mean only break at paragraphs). For your sort of text-footnote ratio, you need it to be more like 500.
*  "Footnote factor single column" could also be adjusted. Setting it to 0 will mean that it won't try to count footnote sizes at all during the "reading input" stage. That might cause other problems, but hopefully we've ironed those out by now. I'd actually try setting it to something like 900 (pretend it's 90%), so it's close to right, even though the original value is 100 (10%) for historical reasons...

* Last note: widowpenalty and Last note: clubpenalty values  affect how bad it considers breaking before the last line and after first line  of paragraphs in the footnote respectively.

* The various "split note" numbers are hopefully self explanatory... I'm not sure if they only apply to paragraphed notes or not.

If none of this helps, then sending me an archive is the best next step. I can't make promises about when I'll be able to dedicate the time to digging though.

Comments

This was very helpful, and I think I am making progress. Thanks a bunch. I had a late 2023 version of the software, so updating definitely made a big difference. Having all these parameters to tweek the footnotes is really helpful, too. Changing the Footnote factor - Single Column made a significant difference. The other parameters not so much. I could be wrong, but it seems that I needed to turn off the Enhanced Paragraph footnotes before all the discrete footnote parameters farther down the list would do anything.

Answer 2

Hola.

We had that situation a while ago, in our case it was due to the illustrations. PTxPrint did a very good job to accommodate the text and images, but some pages were left with too much space at the end.

There is an excellent option that allows you to adjust the final lines on each page, so you can adjust each page and leave it as you want:

• Print a PDF version when you have all your other settings ready (this will help you see which pages you need to edit).
• Go to the "View + Edi" section and then to the "Adj List" tab.
• Click on the "Generate" button (it will probably ask you to press it twice).
• Generate a list. Each line represents a paragraph. 
• To adjust the final lines of a page, note under which verse the last paragraph of that page is generated (for the example below it would be GEN 1:14. Modify the increment the "+0" (+1, +2, etc.) that corresponds to the GEN 1:14 line, to ask PtxPrint to try to add a line to that page, or reduce it to reduce the lines in that paragraph.

PtxPrint will then rework that paragraph and try to add the lines you enlarged. Re-generate a PDF to see the result and continue. 
It can be laborious if you have too many pages with extra space, but the result is worth it (Note: It is better to start from the first page to the end).

There are quite a few other settings you can make in this section

Saludos,

Pepe.