Hi Michael,
The perpetual overset state in Footwork is the same as one sometimes gets in InDesign itself: Sometimes all the pages go blank from a certain point onwards. Have you come across that.
The reason in both cases is the same: There is no logical way for the page-layout algorithm to proceed.
For instance, in Footwork, if you haven’t allowed footnotes to appear on the next page (i.e., the page following the footnote reference), you could get a perpetual overset state if a single line of main text contains, say, 3 footnote references, and the second footnote is so long that there is no way to fit it all on the page.
In such a case, Footwork cannot display the main-text line with the 3 references, since it cannot fit even the beginning of footnote 3 on the page. This is just one example of what might cause a perpetual overset state.
I’ve found that the best way to troubleshoot the issue is to try and lay out the page where things get stuck manually. If you try to do it manually, you will quickly see what the real issue is, and how laying out the page is actually impossible.
Another issue that sometimes causes a perpetual overset is if your GREP expressions (the two expressions that find main-text refs and footnote refs) are not quite working as expected, and are finding too many, or too few, references.
To troubleshoot that, manually load up each GREP query in turn and click on Find Next to see what text it is actually finding.
Does any of that help?
MichaelM
Ariel