I'm three days out from sending my work to an editor, and found some serious problem: many footnotes just aren't rendering.

I have a history text that uses ConTeXt-SBL for the citations, as such, it has lots of footnotes. Sometimes the footnotes are just in the main text, but sometimes also in figure captions, inside floats, inside tables that are inside floats, inside tabulations inside floats, etc.

What I find alarming is it is frequently not rendering all of the footnote messages at the bottom of the page. The actual footnote number within the body is rendered, but no number is listed in at the bottom of the page. So I might see a list of footnotes, for instance, on page 1, I only get footnotes 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, but 4 was mysteriously skipped.

---------------

1 message

2 message

3 message

5 message

6 message

After a lot of trial-and-error and checking logs and checking my BibTeX files for errors, running everything through BibTex Tidy, etc., and failures to make a minimum working example, I found a single pattern:

If the footnote marker appears on the SAME page as the footnote text, it has no problem rendering the footnote. But, if ConTeXt decides to move a float a page or two later on--as it frequently seems to do---such that the footnote marker and footnote text at bottom of page should be on DIFFERENT pages, the footnote message at the bottom of the page won't render.

I've seen some 2+ year old mailing list posts suggesting ConTeXt might have issues with footnotes; they appear to be similar to my issue--is that still a problem? Is there a fix or workaround? Old fixes I could finding in the mailing list don't seem to work with current versions of ConTeXt anymore.

--Joel