Lines cut off at bottom of page

John

I presume you are using a Word Processing mode template, although you haven't said which or whether you created it yourself.

It sounds as though the bottom of your main text area is being cut off by the top of your footer.

+Menu > View > Show Layout+

You can adjust the position of your Document Margins and Footer in:

+Inspector > Document > Document Margins+

…and ensure they are separated.

It is possible for the Footer and text area to overlap. Normally though the Footer will word wrap away any text in the overlap.

It is also possible that you do not have the right Page Setup for your printer or that you have the wrong printer driver.

You can test the non-printing margins by creating a floating image box, filled with grey, the size of your page and seeing exactly how much of it doesn't print.

If you could let us know a little more accurately what you are using and doing it might help us find a solution.

Peter

Take a look at the settings on the Layout inspector. Try setting the "before" and "after" setting for the layout margins to a small non-zero value, say 0.1 inches.

I've observed something like you describe, that the last line gets truncated, when the "before" and "after" setting is zero.

Message was edited by: Warren Beck

You haven't said what make/model of printer you are using. Most ink jet printers, especially HP, have a minimum bottom margin of .56". Your margin of .49" is too small for that. If your printer does borderless printing, I understand that only works for photo printing & may not give a good result with text.

The only solution is to live with that margin or get another printer. Mono laser printers are very reasonably priced these days. Most have minimum margins of .18" to .25" on all sides. They also have a lower cost per page & print crisper text.

John,

It is possible that you have actually got negative baseline setting in your text.

Select the problem text and look in:

+Inspector > Text (4th tab) > More > Baseline shift+ it should be zero.

re the Footnotes separator, this has come up before and seems to be hard coded into Pages.

Peter

I would like to suggest again: have a look at the Layout Inspector and set the top and bottom margins to non-zero values, such as 0.1 inch. When set to zero, I observe cut-off lines at the bottom of pages, more or less just the way you described it.

About the layout margin suggestion, made above:

Today I received a draft document from a student containing the cut-off line phenomenon that you reported, and the before and after layout margins for this word processing document, single column, were set to my previously suggested 0.1 in. I was able to get the cut-off line to be properly paginated (not cut off) by trying several other settings; anything but 0.1 inch on the top or bottom fixed the problem. The document was notably a 24-pt exact linespacing document, as in your case, and as you reported, using doublespacing rather than a fixed linespacing also fixed the problem. This is clearly a bug in the pagination algorithm that is caused by exact linespacing.

(Note that I was also able to fix this cut-off case by changing the document margin. So whether or not the line is cut off is determined by the actual text height for the column of text.)

So, again, I suggest that you play around with the "after" setting for the layout margin (or, alternatively, the document margin) to see what you can get. It appears that the problem is caused by an incorrect or inexact calculation of the page breaks when exact linespacing (leading) is set. In all of the cases I have seen so far, it was possible to find a setting that fixed the cut off. What you need is to make the text height (number of lines times the leading/linespacing) change enough that the cut off goes away.

I would appreciate it if you would write this problem up and submit it the "Provide Pages Feedback" menuchoice on the Pages menu. If enough of us report the problem, perhaps the Pages team at Apple will address it.

John:

I have written up this problem and reported it using the "Provide Pages Feedback" web page.

I am disappointed to see from your example and the one from my student, today, that my layout margin fix is not a general one. It really is unacceptable to have to fiddle around with margin settings to find a magic setting that keeps all of the text displayed. Of course, single or double linespacing could be used, but then when in-line equations or super/subscripted text is involved, the irregular linespacing that results is not really acceptable.

I had hoped that Pages '09 was the answer, but apparently it is not a robust enough tool to trust for routine academic use. I have spent quite enough time trying all of the other tools to state that the only thing that actually is good enough is TeX/LaTeX, but I had hoped to be able to work with an easy-to-use, WYSWYG tool that supports commenting and other "modern" facilities.

John,

I'm wondering where your content came from. Sometimes imports carry with them characteristics, like offset, that aren't reported by the Pages Text Inspector. If so, Paste and Match Style might work, or you could use an intermediate text editor to strip the unwanted attributes. Another thing to try would be to apply one of the standard Paragraph Styles to your text and see if it jumps into line.

Jerry

Re: the suggestion about changing the layout margins "before" and "after"

It turns out that I was wrong about the suggestion of varying the layout margins; it seems that I misunderstood what the layout margins were affecting. The layout margins control the beginning and end of the current layout, and since my simple document had just a single layout, a change in the "before" layout margin was offsetting the text vertically enough to sometimes avoid the bad pagebreak that cut off the line of text.

Further experiments show that with exact linespacing, all that matters is the true height of the text box. With exact linespacing, the number of lines that will appear in the page's textbox is very stable; the same number of lines appear on every page.

If a line of text is partially cut off, what one needs to do is to make adjustments of the document top and bottom margins so as to get the entire line of text to not be cut off. As long as a standard double-spaced (24 pt exact linespacing) page with no nonstandard linespacings for display equations or headings will display properly, then most of the time the pages will be paginated properly. However, as John may have suggested, it really comes down to a given page's text length. Certain pages will have the last line cut off if the total text height falls in just the right range and if the last line of the text on that page has exact linespacing. If the last line has single/double linespacing, it appears that it will break to the next page properly.

To conclude, if you have to use exact linespacing because of your use of in-line equations, etc., you are going to have to look at every page in the document to see if it has a bad break to the next page. This is clearly unacceptable, it is not due to user error, it is a serious problem in the pagination algorithm. I sure hope that Apple will fix this problem soon. I think that this is a fatal problem that rules out the use of Pages for the time being for mathematical/technical documents with decent appearance.

Sorry for the rant, but I wanted to close out my contribution to this thread to address the incorrect suggestion I made that the layout margins could be adjusted to get this problem to go away. All that matters is the text box height and your choice of leading/linespacing; you might be lucky and have things work out, but I'll bet in a long document that you will be sorry if you use exact linespacing.

May you attach a two pages sample file to a mail and send them to my mailbox.
I will check the behavior and send a report to Apple Bugs Hunters.

I never got this problem but some details seems to be odd when using the "exact measure" setting.

Click my blue name to get my address.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France.) vendredi 21 août 2009 15:50:59