Footnote text is messed up

Somehow I am now getting all a’s and o’s and some other odds n ends appearing in place but as itty bitty superscript in my footnotes. I’ve obviously hit some key inadvertently and can’t figure out how to get back to proper typing (Mac).
Help… please…

The simplest way of ditching unwanted formatting is to select the entire range of affected text (and a bit above and below), use the Cut command to remove it, and then use Edit ▸ Paste and Match Style to paste as plain text.

If this involves cutting all of the text, then you do need to be careful about pasting right back into the same place, that would essentially have the same formatting you are trying to avoid. With binder items, you can usually just navigate somewhere else and then back, to have the software flush whatever formatting was left on the “cursor”.

But in this case, I don’t think that would work; I would delete the footnote and make it again, and then paste and match style into the new one.

If that pastes back the same way, then maybe it isn’t actually formatting, but unexpected Unicode characters. That you mention ‘a’ and ‘o’ being superscript in particular is interesting, since 2ª and 2º are how ordinals are often written in Spanish. So they have dedicated characters that look like that, what you see in the previous sentence. That’s always going to paste back that way.

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That’s exactly what it looks like.
Still do as you directed?

It certainly wouldn’t hurt to try! You could use Copy instead of Cut, and make a brand new footnote with Paste and Match Style.

Won’t the match style just repeat the problem?
Off to try now…

Only if it is actual letters and not superscript formatting. If it is letters you’ll just have to retype them.

OK… it looks the same. Deleting and retyping

Still there… Will try retyping into a new footnote.
Still there.

I typed the footnote info into an existing good footnote, copied and pasted where I needed it and it is perfect.
I retried adding a new footnote and the problem reoccured.

I went to a different page in my document and the same problem occurred there… so it’s a footnote formatting issue? If so, do you know how I change the footnote setting?

Okay, if it’s only happening in new notes, then go into the application settings, and in the Editing: Formatting tab, change the font for the Inspector comments font (which footnotes also use).

This will not change older notes immediately, only new notes you create—and hence that is why I’m suggesting this approach, since it seems to be an issue only with newly typed footnotes.

If that does work, then try going back to one of the notes that is odd, right-click on it in the inspector, and select the command to reset its formatting to default. If that fixed it, you can fix the rest the same way.

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Tada!! Thank you! :raised_hands: :heart_hands:

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