Footnote behaviour after doc and docx conversion

[nokidding]

Hi folks,

I work in a team with people using MO, while I use LO. When converting files into doc or docx and even after I have re-adjusted them all on my end in LO, the footnotes behave very oddly: usually alighting the first line towards the centre of the page (see screenshot):

… this gets worse as the editing process continues:

I spent long time trying to sort this out with team members getting a bit frustrated about this. Any help will be much appreciated.

Many thanks! Paolo

(edit: activated screenshots -AK)

[Kruno]

You open, save and edit as docx? Think that every word processor uses it’s own formatings - and each one gets overridden at open (and save). What I would suggest is you don’t edit footnotes - leave them be if everything else looks good in MO. Do not try to reformat, just ignore if everything works fine in MO and let person with MO do the final touches. Other solution is to ask them to use LibreOffice as it’s free, open source and available on virtually every platform out there: no excuses

[nokidding]

Yes, I asked everybody to use LO since the beginning of the time…[YAWN]

[nokidding]

The odd footnotes behaviour continues: it is as if the first line of footnotes were to be set as +something (which obviously it is not in LO). Whenever I open the document in both LO and MO all the footnotes shift fwd by a tab, so if you have a link in the footnote you will see a longish blue line before the actual link starts. Moreover, this line increases as we make more editing to the common document.

It is just very annoying and I run out of suggestions with my team… apart from doing the last edit at the last minute and save it as a pdf. But thanks to anyone who wants to try a solution…

[mikekaganski]

Whenever you have a reproducible scenario of some problem: please file a bug on that with the detailed steps. However old a problem might be, very often virtually nobody cares to bother and create such a reproducer, thinking that somebody else should do that; so even easy-to-fix problems remain hard-to-reproduce, and thus not fixed forever.

[nokidding]

I am not sure what to say, I did not keep track of the scenario so I can only advance HP. One being that… the main text on LO is set to have a first line indent to +1 to distinguish paragraphs. The footnotes seem to reproduce that indent although the style is not set for that and I have even changed the “Inherit from” style under the “Organiser” tab for “Paragraph Style: Footnote Text”… maybe I will start attaching screenshot soon when my Karma has been lifted up onto enlightenment stage

[mikekaganski]

Don’t do that here! I meant a bug report that developers read, not explanations on peer-to-peer user help forum.

Second: even if you have no reproduction “from scratch”, but can provide a document on which it’s reproducible with some steps, that’s OK.

Also: you can always use imgur to share images; filebin to share files, no matter what karma you have.

[nokidding]

Thanks Mike. Your suggestion about the image links is great, here is a screenshot of my footnote area at the moment (I have to say I have been using LO since the beginning of time and even before as OO, but I cannot recall having had this footnote issue ever): screenshot

[Kruno]

Did you make a bug report about this? You don’t mention that in answer or comments. Did you find a solution for this? You jawed but why if no bug report is filed or workaround found? LO picks up formating from MSO and I think it treats them as direct formating so tinkering with styles won’t help much. How you handled this? The only way I know is to reformat every footnote by hand, so I suggested to do fix-up after document is done completely.

[nokidding]

Hi, I did not submit a bug report as yet because I thought to look for a workaround here first. The first editing is always on LO and when I re-open the doc gets worse… so I will file a bug, I guess. Weird thing: my temp solution is to edit at the last minute and then print in pdf. Actually there are quite a few people complaining about an extra tab since version 4 at least… see here

[mikekaganski]

Actually there are quite a few people complaining about an extra tab since version 4 at least… see here

Wait a second: are you referring to a bug that was closed fixed in 2013? Really? And do you expect someone to fix your problem on that grounds?

That bug could be yours, or not. It could be a regression in a recent version. Please file a new bug (and put that older bug to See Also to help others), only then it could be started being worked on.

[nokidding]

Yes you are right, but I meant to attach this to another similar bug still open. Anyway, my first bug

[nokidding]

update: my bug has been marked as ‘duplicate’ of an another recent bug request which recalls an old LO 3.3 bug… etc.

[mikekaganski]

That’s good. among other things, # of duplicates is a measure of impact that the problem has on users.

[Kruno]

And I suggest you add yourself to CC list in that bug report so you get notified when something new happen.