Hidden fields and footnotes - footnote anchor hidden, but not footnote text

Oby · December 1, 2025, 2:54pm

I have a couple of documents where I make quite heavy use of hidden sections. After some LibreOffice update in the last 6 months (I’m not able to identify the exact one) there has been some change to how these fields behave. The issue I am having is that footnote text continues to appear even though the footnote anchor is found within a section that is hidden.

The way I have them set up is that all text I want to be able to hide is encapsulated in sections with the checkbox “Hide” checked, and “With Condition” set to “Hide==1”. I also have an invisible “Set variable” field as the first character of my document that sets the Hide variable to 1 when I want the text in the fields to be hidden (or 0 when I want it to be visible).

Here are two example documents demonstrating this behavior:

Earlier, at least in the early spring, footnote text would hide if the footnote anchor was hidden. I have not been able to find any solution to enable me to hide footnote text.

I am unsure whether there is some way of conditionally hiding footnote text (I tried adding that to fields too, but the “hide” checkbox simply does not stay checked if I do that). If there is some way of doing this, that one is supposed to use, I would love to be informed of it.

But perhaps this is a bug? If so, how should I go about reporting it?

LibreOffice version info:
Version: 25.8.3.2 (X86_64)
Build ID: 8ca8d55c161d602844f5428fa4b58097424e324e
CPU threads: 12; OS: Windows 11 X86_64 (build 26200); UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win
Locale: nb-NO (nb_NO); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded
(I see the same behaviour on LibreOffice for Linux/Ubuntu).

ajlittoz · December 1, 2025, 3:25pm

Here LO 25.8.3.2 (same as yours), Fedora 43 (Linux), KDE Plasma desktop.
Same behaviour. Built-in text says that frames and notes anchored in hidden paragraph/section should be hidden too. This is definitely a (regression?) bug.

Report it on Bugzilla.

EDIT: (after seeing your “answer”
It seems that the faulty behaviour appears after some editing in the text. At first when I opened your document, everything was as expected. But when I added a hidden paragraph (to see if it makes a difference), I got the glitch.

By the way, if you don’t change the number of columns, prefer hidden paragraphs over hidden sections. Sections put more stress on Writer and, if they are numerous, could negatively impact reactivity.

Oby · December 1, 2025, 2:58pm

When double-checking that I had uploaded and linked the example documents correctly, the footnote text was suddenly hidden (!)

From further testing, it seems as if saving, closing, and then reopening the file will ensure that the footnote text stays hidden. Therefore, it seems as if I have stumbled upon a minor bug that can be circumvented by re-opening the document.

Could anyone else confirm that they see the same behavior? If so, I will report this as a bug.