I have a problem with a leading space (as if made with the spacebar) between the footnote number and the text of the note. I need a way to kill that space character, preferably for all notes at once. This problem occurs in documents exported from other software into the rtf format. I do not have an option to correct the issue at the rtf creation stage. You can’t kill an actual space character, as far as I can tell, with any of the global footnote configurations in Writer. [LibreOffice Writer 4.1]
Can you link to an image of what you are seeing (with hidden characters displayed) so we can get a better sense of how to reproduce it and what to search for? Find/replace using regular expressions works for finding a tab separator, but a space (after the tab) prior to the footnote text is more difficult.
I figured it out. Search on ^\s as a regular expression. Replace all with nothing. Thx!
Interesting. The list of LO regular expressions does not include \s. It seems to behave the same here (v4.1.2.2) as \t i.e., it matches a tab character.
Apparently \s is an “ICU” Search Term: http://sirius.on-rev.com/regex/regular_expressions_writer.html
I first stumbled across it in the “Regular” pulldown list of the LO extension “Alternative Find & Replace for Writer.”
That makes sense. The help page is probably just not updated. Thanks for reporting back. Please select your own answer as correct once you have enough karma.