Rudi van der Linde wrote:
Two solutions:
1. Make the footer big enough on all pages.
Useful if most pages needs a signature block, other pages
will waste paper.
I have tried it and it seems to work but out Quality Assurance guy is
going to have a field day with "pages that stop too high". So it is not
a feasible option.
How about making two separate documents?
One document for the part with normal margins and no
signature block, another with big lower margin and
the signature block embedded in the footer.
Then, just print one after the other. You may have to
adjust page and chapter numbers in the second document
of course.
Even better is to find a latex forum and get a tip from
someone who really knows a good way of doing this.
[...]
Your previous suggestions did make a huge difference. I have made sure
the table contains only "simple" text. There is only one place now
where the row enters the footer. Not sure why. I have one cell that
uses {\footnotesize ...}. Is it maybe the culprit?
Hard to say. Table cells of varying size shouldn't really matter,
as far as I know. But this holds only if the footer isn't
overfull. And any trickery with the size of the current page
might affect the longtable in a bad way.
That's why I suggest a latex forum - a real guru will know
a way that works in all cases rather than "most of the time".
Also, sometimes the "Firstrow" appears at the bottom of the page by
itself. Any idea on how to fix it?
I have never seen that happen, but I guess it has something to
do with changing the textheight when the software doesn't
expect it.
Be aware latex uses multiple passes for producing output.
It breaks lines first, then it tries to find good places to break the
page. This process may very well render half of the next
page as well, as finding the very best page break place is
hard and could take several attempts. Some latex commands
gets processed on every try, some only in the final
pass when the page in question actually is output.
Headers and footers in particular are done
only in this last step, because that is when the page
number is guaranteed to be correct. (Commands that test
or print the page number in the main text will therefore
be wrong whenever latex moves a page break around
trying to improve the fit.)
This is why manipulating the page length is so dangerous,
especially as the page break itself may move back and forth
past the size changing command. Changing size when printing
the footer will probably not work at all - the page breaks are
already done at that point.
This may be solvable as you want to have long runs
of either normal pages or short pages with the signature block.
Perhaps there is a way of setting different chapters
with different margins - this should be easier than
abruptly changing margins in the middle of a page.
You can then try some big objects in the table again.
If you want to know more, get Knuth's Texbook
http://www.amazon.com/TeXbook-Computers-Typesetting-Donald-Knuth/dp/0201134489
It explains lots of things, including the tex output routine.
Helge Hafting
