InDesign not applying footnote separator formatting

Question

Does anyone have any idea why this isn't being applied? I want a full point and an emspace after the footnote number before the footnote text, which is what I've told it to do but all it's doing is putting a normal space in.

Answer 1

This occurs if your footnotes for some reason has been manually edited (or perhaps imported from a Word document). The link to the footnote formatting is broken and the footnotes no longer reflect the changes you make.

A solution can be:

• Enter Type > Document Footnote Options.
• Set Footnote Formatting > Separator to a single space (like it is currently).
• Press Tab to leave the text field.
• Set Footnote Formatting > Separator to whatever you want.

This way you should be able to reset the formatting and gain automatic control again.

If this fails you can try to use Type > Convert Footnotes and Endnotes to first convert the footnotes to endnotes and then convert them back to footnotes.

(Btw: I don't think you want that "\" in your separator. The "." doesn't need to be escaped, it's not a GREP selector.)