Footnote issues in Flare 4

[evanarsdall]

Good morning, all:

I have been extensively testing the new print features in Flare 4 and am very impressed with its ability to output directly to PDF. Using a print TOC, six print-only topics, and six page layouts, I created a cover page and copyright page, TOC, lists of figures and tables, several chapters, a glossary, and an index. I used several customized auto-number and cross-reference formats, and all are working well.

What's not working well is footnotes. I included a couple of footnotes, just to test them. I used the Flare help to set up the MadCap | footnote, footnoteBlock, and footnotesBlock styles. I noted that the default for footnote formatting doesn't follow the convention that I'm used to; the comment text wraps to the left, underneath the number. So I used a negative text-indent value and a positive margin-left value to set up the footnote numbering to be more like the following FrameMaker example:

footnote_example.png

The footnote formatting initially looked good, so I moved on to other formatting issues, testing and regenerating the PDF output. Everything was looking the way I wanted it, but then I noted that footnotes had lost the hanging indent and that the comments were no longer wrapping properly. The first two lines of text had acquired a large amount of left margin:

footnote_alignment.png

At that point, I hadn't changed any of my original settings, so I tried removing and re-applying them. This seemed to work at first, but as soon as I regenerated the output, the appearance again resembled the example shown in the second image. My next attempt was to delete and reinsert the footnote, which initially looked OK in the editor and the preview but shifted back to the badly wrapped version when I regenerated the PDF.

As you might also notice from the second image, the footnote border is sitting right on top of the footnote text. The spacing had originally looked normal, but as this problem progressed, it disappeared. During one of my attempts to re-apply the settings, I tried to add correct this problem, too. I have read every help topic on footnotes several times, and according to what I understand, the footnotesBlock style should handle the outside spacing for the entire block. Unfortunately, the example is not specific to spacing; it only explains how you might use the block styles to add a border around the footnote blocks (not very practical, IMO). So I experimented with margins and padding, both in the outer and inner blocks, but I can no longer recover the lost spacing nor control it.

This is the only major issue I'm having with Flare's PDF output at this point. Does anyone have any experience with footnotes?