Footnotes Broken Upon Export to *.doc

[benjamin]

I work with the Zotero plugin for LibreOffice, and unfortunately, because the manual footnote editing tools are not robust enough in LibreOffice, need to export these files to *.doc for final processing and sharing with my colleagues. Upon converting from *.odt to *.doc, my footnotes all become “broken” as regards formatting. More specifically, where in LibreOffice I have a regular footnote, in the *.doc version, each footnote number turns into a regular, unformatted number, followed by a line break, then a tab, then a period, and finally the original footnote. I can fix these manually, but not without a great deal of effort.

I am on a Mac, running Word 2011, and LibreOffice 4.1. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Regards,
Benjamin

[oweng]

There are several open bugs relating to “doc+footnote”. Of these, fdo#39205, fdo#64026 (and probable duplicate fdo#66224), and maybe fdo#71984 appear likely candidates. The problem with these bugs reports though is they cover a number of issues:

• Leading TAB character prior to the note text.
• Issues when mixing endnotes and footnotes.
• DOC and DOCX file formats.
• Inclusion of page break character / carriage return in leading endnote.
• Endnotes being placed on the wrong page.
• Negative indentation in footnote.

I can’t reproduce the specifically indicated problem (in the question) here under MacOS v10.6.8 running LO v4.1.2.2 and Word 2011 v14.3.7, however it may be a Zotero-related issue i.e., how LO handles Zotero-created markup or even the type of markup Zotero is creating. With only footnotes in an ODT, the file appears to export to DOC without issue (when opened with LO or Word 2011), other than displaying as though they have a leading TAB character (in Word 2011). As soon as an endnote is included though, then all the problems associated with endnotes become evident.

[comeonpilgrim]

I have exactly the same problem. Interestingly, the problem only really shows up when I create an ODT document from Scrivener using Scrivener’s footnote option. If I create a document without footnotes, but use Zotero to create footnotes later, I have the additional tab, but not the additional full stop / period before the footnote. Either way, it is annoying and makes it difficult to use LibreOffice as I have so many footnotes. I have updated to the latest version of LibreOffice, but the problem still exists.