Footnote being placed on wrong page

Hi,
I have attached a document where the footnote is not behaving as desired - instead of appearing at the bottom of the page where it is placed, it appears at the bottom of the next page. I believe the reason has something to do with the two frames I have placed either side of page 1. On page 2 the frames are not there, and the footnote seems comfortable without them.

In the attached document, if you delete the footnote, you will see the paragraph text [‘paragraph (alt+p)’ style] jumps back to the first page where it should be.

There is a secondary problem in that no matter what I do, I can’t seem to get rid of the small horizontal line at the top left of the footnote.

Any help is appreciated.

troubleshoot.odt (16.0 KB)

Remove this dividing line via the page template (Format → Page Style → Footnote)


2025-04-19 09 52 01

You seem to be fighting the in-built styles and features instead of working with them and taking advantage of inheritance, line numbering, etc.

The sample attached will number the lines (Tools > Line Numbering) so the frames aren’t needed. The character style is Line Numbering
You mentioned stanzas so I put line breaks where you had paragraphs collected between by blank paragraphs. The blank paragraphs were then removed, allowing the space below the paragraph to be defined.
It works better if the headings use the same font. I don’t have yours, so I set it to Linux Libertine G which is vaguely similar.
I think altering the separator line would work better, so I did.
troubleshoot_EA.odt (32.3 KB)

@PKG Thanks for your reply.
I did try that and it didn’t work, but I have since started with a new odt document not converted from a docx, and that seems to have solved it.

@EarnestAl Thanks for your reply.
You may not have noticed the numbers in the left and right frame are different. That is not by accident. The goal is not to count the of number lines. It is not even to number paragraphs, although that would be closer.

However, can I ask what you have done with the header? Because that appears to be what I am trying to achieve. Each new page should have consecutive number, mirrored. That part is simple enough. But on the other side of the header I want to type text, and that text will be different on each new page. How do I achieve that?

@EarnestAl simply assigned Right Page built-in page style to your first page. This page style automatically alternates with Left Page built-in style. Since you have two different page styles, you can have different headers.

Regarding insertion of chapter heading, the corresponding paragraph was styled Heading 1 and “Part 1” Heading 2. Then a "standard cross-reference does the trick.

If you are not familiar with page style juggling, you can achieve the same result with a single page style, e.g. Default Page Style like in your original document. In Header tab, untick Same content on left and right pages. This decouples the pages and left/right headers become independent. Insert what ever you want in the headers.

If your “different text” is not related to some contents, this is not possible because it requires to use a new page style for every page. And this is done by inserting a special page break. Doing so, you lose any advantage in Writer because you handle text flow manually.

But if your “different text” may be computed from some “remarkable” item in your page, like a sub-heading, this “different text” can be mirrored in the header with a cross-reference. So, we need to have more details about it to suggest a solution.

By the way, you didn’t mention OS name nor LO version.

The “different text” is indeed manual entry and not cross referenced to anything on the page.

Meanwhile, the page numbers are automatic.

So I need something half automatic, half manual. Both mirrored.

If it’s not possible I could just do the page numbers manually also.

OS: Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.1

Will get back to you with my libre office version when I’m back at the computer, but it was installed from the software store in Mint.

Here is an alternative using a list style to count each paragraph, press Tab at the beginning of a new line to not count.

No reference to what is on the page?

The sample uses Heading 1 still for Part n but Heading 2 for Chapter. Unfortunately, I cannot stop it using Chapter in the field even though I set the field use use Level 1 only. By changing the heading “Chapter” to use Paragraph style Chapter it will allow Part 1 to appear in the first page header but then Chapter won’t appear in any TOC.
troubleshoot_EAv2.odt (33.3 KB)

Page numbers are a field so no need. It is having to have different contents on each page that aren’t a field (the same field) that is the problem.

I think you bump into a subtle area allocation issue. I don’t know if it is a bug or not.

The problem is related to the position of your LeftFrame and RightFrame and more globally to the consistency of your settings.

Though I don’t understand the usefulness of your frames, the purpose seems to be to number the paragraphs. You anchored them to the Book-styled paragraph which is the first here but you can’t do it easily on subsequent pages. You can choose an arbitrary paragraph but there is no guarantee that this paragraph won’t shift to another page after edits. You can’t either anchor the frame to same page-related element like the header because it would make it part of the header and contents becomes “constant” (can’t vary across pages).

The LeftFrame horizontal position is Left to Left of paragraph text area (respectively “right” for RightFrame). This means you send the frame inside the left indent of this paragraph style. Consider the paragraph box model to see the consequences. The paragraph bounding box extends horizontally from left to right page margins. You remove from this area left and right indents (then border and padding) to define the effective text area.

In your case, paragraph indents are zero, but it doesn’t change the issue. Your frames are inside the page text area, not inside the margins. This means they interfere with text (as intended) restricting useable area towards the centre. It works fine with main text.

You defined your frame height as 100% of [page] Entire paragraph area. Note the word I added. “100%” was manually entered and was converted to absolute size immediately. This absolute size (18+ cm) will never be evaluated again, resulting in fixed size. Your frame extends vertically all over page useable are.

Footnote area is “borrowed” from page text area. Apparently, the space allocation algorithm looks for full-width availability. When the note is inserted, your frames are already there and lock the used area to bottom of page (or conflict with the rudimentary (?) allocation algorithm). The algorithm considers then that all space is exhausted and sends the note on next page. But Writer tries to keep anchor and note on the same page. Consequently, the line containing the anchor is also flushed to next page. Your widow/orphan parameters in Paragraph style cause extra lines to shift also.

There are two ways to fix the issue

Send the frame into the margins

Change horizontal position to Left of page text area (respectively right). You may need to adjust your page margins to make room for the frame and some separator space. Don’t use Wrap Spacing or you’ll recreate a conflict.

Temporarily modify the frames

It seems the sequence of insertions plays a key factor in the issue. You created your frames first then typed your text. This means frames are already there when you insert the note.

After typing your “first page” (i.e. enough text to overflow what would be the first page), change frame properties to have height at 1cm unchecking Relative to. The note and text shift back to first page.

Revert properties ticking Relative to with 100%. Since the note has been laid out, page text area has been recomputed to the correct value.

Other issues

Word compatibility

Your document has been in contact with M$ Word in the past (perhaps converted from a DOCX document). The “fossils” present in the document may play nasty tricks on your back in some future. You have many spurious character styles and on list style. This is probably caused by inheritance of a numbered list.

HeadFrame

This frame is problematic. It is anchored To page, meaning it will appear only on page 1. If your intent is to echo chapter heading in the header, use standard cross-references with fields. This will work if you style your part, chapter, sub-chapter, … headings with built-in Heading n paragraph styles. And this will also enable automatic TOC construction.

Since the frame will be present only on page 1, requesting Mirror on even pages is pointless.

Bad US typewriter habit

You end your sentences with a period followed by two spaces. This is a “tradition” inherited from the mechanical typewriter era when fonts were by nature monospaced. This habit has been officially deprecated for decades even in the US. Typing several spaces in a row has detrimental consequences of the justify algorithm (apparently not your case as you align left, but keep that in mind).

Note also that several paragraph start with a space.

Tab/First line indent conflict

In Paragraph paragraph style, you defined both First line indent and a tab stop at 0.5 cm. The tab stop is useless and even detrimental. It causes surprising (for newbies) behaviour when editing a paragraph. And even if you hope to align some 2+ lines on first line indent, you can’t predict where line wrap occurs. If you use Shift+Enter Tab, this is logically faulty. You’d better start a new paragraph.

Vertical space with empty paragraphs

This is a very pernicious form of direct formatting able to ruin your layout without yourself being aware of it.

I suppose this is coupled with your decision to set Line spacing at fixed 0.39 cm in all your paragraph style. The intent is probably to be able to number your paragraph in lateral frames without vertical offset. Once again this is wrong.

Numbering your paragraphs can be done through a list style. There are enough parameters in a list style to send the number in the left margin (of course, you can’t have the number on both sides).

There is a much more complex solution (opening the possibility to have the number on both sides) based on small frames but I don’t recommend it because it will lead to an excessive number of frames impacting Writer performance.

Note separator

The note separator is defined in Footnote tab of a page style. You can suppress it by setting Style to None.

Personally, I would eliminate the top border you added on Footnote paragraph style. If you have several footnotes in a page, separating each footnote with an horizontal line results in a strange layout (but this is personal taste, YMMV).

2 Likes

@ajlittoz Thanks so much, this very helpful!

This seems to be the answer I am looking for. Narrowing the left and right page margins, and putting the frames outside them, does indeed make the footnote work correctly.

You are correct. I am not familiar with list styles, and do need the numbers in both left and right columns, since they contain different content. I will run with your above solution for now, but may have to reconsider if it breaks.

See my comment above for what I was trying to achieve with this. There is surely a better solution using just one header - I just haven’t been able to get it to work yet.