How do I edit footer for master documents

I have a master document which incorporates forty or fifty subdocuments at this point, with more to come. The footer currently contains a page number only. I would like to add a line of text above the page number, but cannot. Plus, I don’t remember how I got the page number feature inserted.

Does anyone have advice for this?

Thanks, in advance.

What is the relation between the question and the description?

Edit your question and its description (don’t use an answer reserved for solutions) to improve the description of your goal. What do you want to modify? The footer in a subdocument or in the master? Is the added line part of the footer?

The page number is inserted by Insert >Field>Page Number.

You state: “your question and its description (don’t use an answer reserved for solutions) to improve the description of your goal. What do you want to modify?”

In the question I state: “The footer currently contains a page number only. I would like to add a line of text above the page number, but cannot. Plus, I don’t remember how I got the page number feature inserted.”

Seems I included my question in the form of " I would like to add a line of text above the page number." Sorry if that was not clear.

Last night I found the way to edit the footer, but it was random, and I no longer remember the method, so I cannot post it here.

Please replace word “footnote” by “footer” in your question title.

Thanks, forgot there was a difference.

Footers and headers are attributes of page styles and stored in them. This presents no conceptual difficulty in simple documents.

But wit master/subdocuments, you must modify the active page style, knowing that attributes set in a subdocument do not forward to the master. The master uses its own page styles which only share their name with those in the subs. In other words, page styles in master are independent of those in the subs, even if they have the same name.

You can take advantage of this to add comments, reminders, caveats, instructions, … in header or footer of the subdocument.

The “real” header printed with the master is the one you set in the master page style(s).

Write your additional line in the master footer:

  • enable View>Formatting Marks and View>Text Boundaries (not mandatory but very convenient to see where thing are located; the clues do not print, so you can let them always enabled)
  • click in the footer
  • make all you editing

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