Custom Footnote callers

[Mike-y]

So, I like to proofread by pushing an epub, then sending that to Google Play and listening to the work.

When I do this, footnote callers are ‘spoken’. Since I want to publish digitally, and do expect people to listen to the work, I’d like to be able to avoid this.

I have an IDEA that if I set up custom footnotes using number or letter glyphs from some other area of unicode (MATH sans bold numbers or letters). However, If I set up numeric callers, Logically the first one should be one, but then the singles digits should flip to 0 when the tenth one displays. IS there a way to tell Libreoffice to start with the 2nd item in the custom footnote caller list? the first Item being footnote “0” works, but there are some customers and grammar cops that will think it ODD. To me, it’s a better solution than having the callers spoken as I listen to the document.

That is 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 in the custom list will produce footnote callers in that order, but then the next footnote will be marked 11.

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 producces 1-9 then 0, then 11, then 12-19, then 10, then 21, etc.

0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 produces normal counting, but it starts at 0 instead of 1.

Or maybe there is a way to label the style as ‘annotation’ so it won’t get spoken when being read aloud. I can’t find examples to examine, but I’ve seen and heard locked up works where read-aloud skips the footnotes and callers completely.

[ajlittoz]

Can you explain how you specify a custom sequence for autonumbered note callout? I always thought you could only select exclusively from the built-in drop-down menu.

With the built-in sequences, you can go to Tools>Footnote/Endnote Settings and request a starting number with Start in Autonumbering section.

Here LO 24.8.4.2 under Fedora 41 with KDE Plasma desktop. What is your configuration?

[Mike-y]

Hrmm…

I tested this years ago, maybe on LO 5.x, maybe even back on OOO 3.x. (Or I think I did.)

(I work in the xml file, specifically a flat opendocument file… and only work in the LibreOffice writer interface for “typesetting” which means to me doing final page design… pushing and pulling paragraphs to avoid single words, paragraph widows and orphans on pages, and deal with hyphenation issues.)

According to the ODF spec: for the numbering definition (style:num-format) A single digit entry provides callers that are produced by the program, but (what I remember testing, and I thought I was following some instructions…) if you put in a comma or space separated list, the program would accept the list as the complete list of callers and then count up like digits, adding a 10s place, then 100s place if there were more footnotes/endnotes per unit than the list provided.

This doesn’t seem to be supported in either LO 6.4 nor 24.x that I develop on. Instead, what’s encoded into the file for this variable is ALWAYS a string that exactly matches the the string you see in the dropdown dialog, and it doesn’t support custom lists, or rather I was unable to guess a way to tell it to use my list instead of the program’s, but my memory was either comma separated, or space separated.

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However, after you asked me… I was looking in the LO interface, and the question I asked (can you start footnotes on later numbers of a custom list?) is answered right there in the dialog:

Counting will skip items in the list. I haven’t tested if you can force it to start with double digits.

So my plan works, but it seems someone in the last decade hardwired the program so that now you can’t insert custom lists. It’s a minor issue, and I’m hoping to discover some magic that instead tells Google Play “don’t speak this”. But it’s also annoying to see LO degrading from a real workhorse to a toy MS Word clone. I did have this capability to use my own custom lists in reserve because there are project that will require them (minority languages). Apparently those will now require post processing and rewriting the markers individually in the .fodt… but .fodt isn’t a saved file, but an import file that LibreOffice processes, so what I really mean is post processing inside a zipped. .odt file. And that starts getting too technical to one-off, but rather forces me to start asking what platform is right for making high quality epubs in which ‘read to me’ works.