Dear list,

I’m afraid to admit that ConTeXt notes are increasily problematic for
me. I don’t think this is special to me and I hope we can discuss the
general issue.

Bottom notes are somewhat tricky in ConTeXt. The user expects that these
notes (either footnotes, or linenotes) aren’t moved to the next page. I
mean, no reader expects to find a full footnote in the next page from
the one that calls it. (At least, I have never seen that in any book
read or paged through.)

There may be good reasons for that, but ConTeXt doesn’t enable this by
default. Both options "split=verystrict" and "scope=text" have to be
used in "\setupnote".

This translated in wrong space before notes when paragraph form was
used. I was very interested to use these (line)notes for critical
editions, but sometimes the text run into the notes. I’m afraid that
left linenotes extremely problematic to be used.

With the arrival of LMTX, space before footnotes is more problematic
than before. No paragraph notes, see the attached sample (wrong-6.png).
In other cases, ConTeXt seems to ignore totally that the page bottom
contains footnotes.

I cannot provide minimal samples. Consider that if it were so easy to
reproduce, problably the issue would have been gone long ago.

Even when one avoids the problematic bottom partition (which I did in
that case by removing the "before" option from "\setupnote[footnote]"),
there is clearly an issue with the footnote having its space before
remaining blank from the body text (wrong-2.png).

My first question is why the bottom notes have problems to preserve the
space before them (and simultaneously remain in the same page where they
come from). This applies also for paragraph notes.

My second question is what can be improved to achieve what may be
considered as a basic typographic feature.

Sorry for not providing more than output samples. Bear with me. I may
not be an expert user, but I think I’m a frequent ConTeXt user. And I
don’t think it is totally wrong to consider this a basic feature that
needs to be improved.

Many thanks for your help in advance,

Pablo
--
http://www.ousia.tk