When a footnote is on the last line of a page the footnote is wrongly formatted. The separator line comes below the footnote and the footnote just adds itself to the text.
The problem can be avoided by forcing a pagebreak before the paragraph so that it’s the first paragraph ion the next page, but this is undesirable as it can leave too much white space.
Is there a workaround or fix for this problem?
I have never experienced the behaviour as reported under either OOo or LO. A footnote will either add itself to the end of a page if there is room or move itself to the next page according to the style definition. Check the widow / orphan definitions. A screenshot would explain a lot.
For sure it’s a bug. In cases like that, I try to change, not the last, but one (or more) of the others paragraphs on page. Sometimes I put a linebreak (shift + enter) in a line to antecipate the break and change the vertical size of the paragraph. So, doing this kind of changes, I can force part of the last paragraph to go to another page without use a pagebreak and with minimal visual impacts.
Here’s the link for filing a bug about this problem. The QA team will be happy to help you track down this issue!