Alternating headers on footnotes at end of document, page number + chapter name

I’m using the feature to display footnotes at the end of the document.

What I want to achieve:

  • Footnotes at end of document

  • Headers alternating left / right

  • On left pages: page numbers left, name of chapter (according to footnotes) on the right

  • On right pages: vice versa

  • This is for a book with 12 chapters that have 300+ footnotes each, and when the reader is checking a footnote, they should be able to discern where they are currently searching by glancing at the current page’s header.

What I tried so far, each without success:

In the footnotes, I’m using a “Heading 2 footnote” for styling. The textual value of this Heading 2 does not appear, when using Insert - Cross-Reference - Doc - Chapter - Chapter Name - Level “2”. Instead, the Level 1 heading is displayed (which is the chapter’s heading, called “Footnotes”, so not useful in the page headers). Perhaps LO does not consider it to be a part of the document structure since it’s within the footnotes?

On a footnote page, I can manually insert page numbers left/right alternating, because the little blue drop down option lets me choose this, specifically (page number and page count only). There is no option for chapter name.

On a footnote page, when I manually edit in each header, alternating works out, but not the content itself. I can type in some text and have it appear on all right pages, but a few right pages down, I can not input different content without previous right pages also changing.

In the Footnotes / Endnotes feature, I set up a page style to be used, but the “follow up page style” setting is not being considered. When I set it to “left page”, the footnotes at end of doc only use the left page style and never the follow up style (right), and this is how I lose the header content in the first place. I remembered this to be working 10 years ago. I tested it now and found that it stopped working with version 4. Starting with version 5, LO still lets me choose a page style in the footnotes/endnotes feature, but does not consider that style’s “follow up style” setting. Instead, whichever style I choose is the page style for all footnotes at the end of the document.

I opened the XML file in the ODT archive to check the code, but the content “stops” with the beginning of the chapter “Footnotes”. I understand that this is because LO will collect all footnotes from withint he XML flow and show them at the end, as expected. This seems to make it impossible for me to manually edit the headers in the source code somehow, or introduce some other manual hack, which would be fine.

I inserted a text variable by a footnote heading 2, with the content of that heading manually put in. When trying to show this variable content in the header, it causes the same problem as in 3. The value of the variable seems to be the most current one that I set, not any value taken from the “flow” of the footnote section. So I get “Footnotes” correctly on all left pages, but “name of the last chapter” on all right pages.

Set a variable at the first footnote (first chapter), same variable with different value on first footnote in second chapter - when displaying this variable in the footnotes page’s header, only the last value is ever shown, not the value in reference to the “flow”.

How is this normally done?

Thank you in advance for your help!

MacOS 10.14.6 (18G95)
Libreoffice 7.0.0.3 (already tried some 6.x versions)
JRE 1.8.0_92 - more recent versions don’t seem to install, not sure if relevant
JDK 14.0.2 - installed this as well, unsure if it works (LO still asks to choose Java on startup)

Your final request to have 12 chapters (change of page style) of footnotes is unlikely to succeed as an automation because endnotes go at the end of the document, effectively the last chapter. You could copy and paste the text of the endnotes but the connection would be broken and the numbers in the text would disappear so they would have to be inserted as superscript numbers manually.

You could cheat a little by using frames anchored to page with the Chapter name covering the header. But note that they would be anchored to that page so if the content is pushed to a different page the frame would not match the page contents any more.

Set your page style to Right and Left or Mirrored

In Format > Page Style in Header tab untick the box that says " Same content on left and right pages", do the same for the Footer tab. Arrange your left and right headers and footers to suit.

Thank you, Earnest Al. Frames anchored to page, covering the header works perfectly!

For future reference:

The option for “chapters of footnotes” seems implied, when the feature Tools - Footnotes and Endnotes - “Counting” supposedly (official docs) lets me select by document / by chapter / by page. In my current version 7.0.0.3, the selection is blank, though, and the only option available is per document. “Counting” and “Start at” seem to be mixed up. “Start at” lets me select blank, or “per document”. I’m leaving it at blank and the counting ends up to be by chapter. Chapter names are inserted automatically, except the very first one. I can not add it manually.

Selecting all (or even multiple) endnotes for copy/paste is not possible. I’m finding online that they could be exported somehow, but it seems unreliable.

I deleted all header content / settings, and only left the dimensions as they were, in order to keep the page area consistent.