How to reduce spacing between footnotes?

[EileenP]

Hi, I'm tearing my hair out trying to figure out which element will reduce the space between footnotes. Can anyone help? TIA.

Flare - how do I reduce space.png

[sarrantsvt]

Place the cursor in the footnote at the bottom of the page (or wherever it appears) and look in the Style box to see what style is in use.

style.png

In mine it is MadCap:footnote.Block. Make changes to properties of MadCap:footnote.Block in the CSS. For example, reduce the value of line-height or change the margins.

[EileenP]

Place the cursor in the footnote at the bottom of the page (or wherever it appears) and look in the Style box to see what style is in use.

style.png

In mine it is MadCap:footnote.Block. Make changes to properties of MadCap:footnote.Block in the CSS. For example, reduce the value of line-height or change the margins.

Thank you for your response. I tried this (and many other things) and nothing is having any effect.
(I find it strange that line-height has no effect.)
And yes, I am making these changes in the correct medium.
Any other ideas?

Thank you again.

[Nita Beck]

What is your HTML structure for the footnotes? In other words, kindly show us the code for those two footnotes. Not that that'll lead us to a solution necessasrily, but it's something I'd explore while troubleshooting.

[EileenP]

What is your HTML structure for the footnotes? In other words, kindly show us the code for those two footnotes. Not that that'll lead us to a solution necessasrily, but it's something I'd explore while troubleshooting.

Ok, when I went to insert the code, I noticed that each footnote includes a <p> tag inside the <MadCap:footnote> tag. When I deleted that, the space disappeared.

It's a bit disconcerting because the footnotes are in topics that were imported from Word documents. ALL of the footnotes contain <p> tags. After each import (of which I'll be doing many in the coming months), I'll need to go back and delete them all. Ugh.

Thank you for the hint!

[RStreets]

Could you edit the footnotes on Word first and associate them with a style? This could be mapped during import so that it was formatted as something other than <p>. Then you could either use a specific paragraph style that's correctly formatted to close up the footnote paragraphs, or identify the footnote paragraphs to globally remove the "rogue" formatting?

[Nita Beck]

It's a bit disconcerting because the footnotes are in topics that were imported from Word documents. ALL of the footnotes contain <p> tags. After each import (of which I'll be doing many in the coming months), I'll need to go back and delete them all. Ugh.

You have two options to clean up the footnotes from the Word imports.

Idea 1: Create a complex selector in your stylesheet that will mitigate the margins/padding above and below the paragraphs within the footnotes. Sorry, I don't readily have code to share with you. This is the solution I'd do, as it would mean that you don't need to do anything for the individual footnotes.

Idea 2: Use the Find and Replace window's Elements pane to craft a find-and-replace run that would unbind the <p> within footnotes. You'd need to do this cleanup after each new import from Word. IMPORTANT: Back up your project before doing this kind of global code change, in case something goes wrong.

I hope these ideas point you in a good direction.

[EileenP]

Thank you @Nita Beck and @Rstreets.
I decided to use FAR to clean these up after each import.
Thank you!

[robdocsmith]

Following Nita's suggestion, if the spacing is coming from the paragraph tag inside the footnote tag I'd add something like:

Code: Select all

MadCap|footnote p
{
     margin: 0;
     padding: 0;
}

into your stylesheet. This should remove extra spacing from all paragraph tags within footnotes. Then you'd probably need to tweak the settings to get things to display how you want them to.
A once-off fix is always better to me than thing you have to remember to do after each build.

Hope that helps,

Rob

[EileenP]

Oh, that's excellent. Thank you, Rob!