How to keep footnotes on the correct pages, especially after the structural document has been edited?

When you use footnotes in a structured FM-document (after an XML-transformation for example), you might find it hard to keep the footnotes on the correct pages. Framemaker does not keep ALL footnotes on the correct pages, especially when the footnotes are long. We never found a fast and automatic way; only workarounds, most certainly when the text is justified.

The easiest way is to move text to the following page so that the footnotemarker is on the correct page again. We think you can only do this by forcing a page-break. Unfortunately this often leaves large white spaces in your document.

You can also manually split a long footnote to divide it between two pages, usually after you move some of the main text to the next page: you cut some lines of a footnote and enter it after the preceding footnote text. You can manually enter the footnotenumber preceding the footnotetext.

A new problem arises when you manually break pages to make footnotes stick to their corresponding pages: the text USED to be justified properly, but after force breaking a sentence to force the footnotemarker to the next page; you will find that the text in the last sentence on the page is no longer justified.... If the text is ALMOST justified you could change the spacing slightly to make it look justified; this is rarely the perfect solution however and very often you can see that the text is not completely justified.
After some experimenting we found a way that solves this problem nicely. Keep in mind that this solution has to be documented or future processing of this document will most certainly show some surprises...

If you enter a certain word after the manual pagebreak the text will be justified again... to make the unwanted word invisible you have to make the text white. We really hope someone can offer a better solution but until now we haven't found any...so we stick to this one. We use a standard word ofcourse, something like 'justified' to make future editing (find and replace) easier. It works!

Let us know if you have better solutions please!

Greetings from the Netherlands

Kees and Jos