[OS X TeX] Footnote glued to the text

[Ross Moore]

Hi Alain,

On 05/02/2013, at 2:44 PM, Alain Schremmer wrote:

> 
> There are ALWAYS message about boxes that are either overfed or under-nourished or something.
> 
>>> Amused regards
>> 
>> Oh sorry, I forgot --- you never look at that, do you?
>> ;-)
> 
> Never say never. If only because it's you, I just looked. (But this reminded me why I "never look at that": to see all that stuff that doesn't tell me anything depresses me.)
> 
> It seemed that there was all sort of stuff about previous typesets and so I made the obvious mistake: I thought I would trash all the aux files and re-typeset but now it's OK!

Knuth (or someone else) even talks about the possibility of having a footnote 
in a line that will occur near the bottom of the page. When the pages are typeset,
the presence of the footnote forces the page to be shorter, moving the
footnote reference to the top of the next page, so that the footnote would 
appear on the page before it is referenced!  
But if the footnote is moved to that next page, then the extra space allows
the text with reference to occur back at the bottom of the previous page.

Successive typesets alternate between these two positions.

This is a dilemma that cannot be resolved automatically.


It could be that something similar is happening to you.
The way to fix it is to alter the text in your document to either add or 
subtract overall length, without changing the meaning, so that everything 
can reach a stable state.



> 
> So I got the log and the console out of the trash but somehow, they don't quite look the same. In any case there is an overfull message in the console a few lines before the text of the footnote:
> 
> Overfull \hbox (27.50897pt too wide) detected at line 432
> [] [] []
> 
> Sounds like "all quiet on the western front" to me.
> 
> Then I looked at the log. Same stuff as in the console about line 432.
> 
> So we will never know where that last bug in TeX is. But considering the amount of stuff I seem to be doing wrong, it looks like a pure miracle that it should typeset. So, I have decided never to badmouth Knuth ever again.
> 
> Contrite regards
> --schremmer



Hope this helps,

	Ross

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Ross Moore                                       ross.moore at mq.edu.au 
Mathematics Department                           office: E7A-419      
Macquarie University                             tel: +61 (0)2 9850 8955
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