Earlier today I was able to select all footnotes with ctrl + A.
Then, as I was working on the footnotes for my document (none other than my doctoral thesis), something probably happened and now when I press ctrl + A, I can only select ONE footnote.
Something also happened: before the footnotes had single spacing, and now, an extra space was added after every footnote (I have around 700+ footnotes). I put on “Toggle formatting marks” and I see that there really is a space after every footnote (and I don’t know if I should just manually remove the space for each and every single footnote).
I just wanna finish my thesis. But this glitch is giving me a headache.
*Might be helpful to note that I was originally working on MS Word on a PC in a different country. Then when I moved to a new location, I no longer had MS Word, and so I basically copy-pasted that entire thesis on Libreoffice. Which screwed up a lot of the original formatting.
Please edit (=modify it) your question to mention OS name, LO version and save format (odt vs. doc(w)).
I don’t understand your “all footnotes selection”. It is not possible to do that because footnotes are not internally grouped in a reserved area. Ctrl+A selects the entirety of a single footnote (i.e. all paragraphs if it is multi-paragraph). Nothing more can be done because of the way notes are internally kept.
For your footnote spacing, attach a 1- or 2-page sample extracted from your thesis.
Reminder: for such a document it is imperative to work with styles to simplify your life. Otherwise you’ll never be able to meet the layout requirements or you’ll do so with great pain. Footnotes are styled Footnote and you perhaps modified this style to include additional space above or below.
You can select more than one footnote content with Shift+Up/Down Arrows.
.
EDIT:
Works for:
Version: 7.3.7.2 (x86) / LibreOffice Community
.
Do NOT works for:
Version: 7.5.1.2 (x86) / LibreOffice Community
CPU threads: 4; OS: Windows 6.1 Service Pack 1 Build 7601; UI render:
Perhaps my footnotes were not styled “footnote” before, which could explain why I could select them all with ctrl + A.
So now that I’m basically in formatting hell (or purgatory, since I guess there’s a way out from this haha), is there anything I can do such that my footnotes are no longer “internally grouped in a reserved area”?
(Or maybe there’s a more elegant solution so that I could 1) get rid of the spaces between footnotes without manually having to erase them and 2) be able to format all my footnotes in a uniform way.)
No, this is a design choice. Footnote text is stored at the anchor location and displayed at bottom of page when the page is laid out. Consequently, the collection of footnote text is not contiguous, which makes it impossible to select globally.
From what I see on the screenshot (a screenshot has not the same diagnostic value a a file and usually don’t allow to find an explanation), you have empty paragraph in some of the notes (note 243 has none). You have typed them manually.
Since a well-formatted document never contains empty paragraphs (you style your thesis, don’t you?), you can delete empty paragraphs with Edit>Find & Replace. Enter ^$ in Find, nothing in Replace and tick Regular expression. Check with Find All then Replace All.
But this leaves one empty paragraph in notes, i.e. this won’t change your present state. These last empty paragraphs can only be removed manually.
Unfortunately, you chose to save your thesis .docx which is not the native Writer format. The document must be translated when opening and once again when saved. These repetitive conversions/translations progressively damage the document structure beyond repair. If .docx is a requirement of your supervisor/university, the correct way to address this issue is to work .odt and convert to .docx only to send the document to recipients. And never work on a returned reviewed document lest you’ll enter again in the damage cycle. The formats have not the same formatting features. IMHO ODF (for .odt) is more powerful and versatile than .docx because it better separates contents from appearance making possible to tune formatting without ever touching text (you only play with styles).
The best thing you can do is read the Writer Guide, understand that styles are in fact semantic tagging (you don’t request bold, italic, … but you tell Writer this is a chapter heading, my main topic, a note, in aimportant word, …), design your set of styles (starting from built-in ones you can customise) and, after that, paste our existing document as unformatted text in a blank document. You apply styles to the paragraph and words and you’re done.
This might explain the “I was able to select all footnotes with ctrl + A” - it could only be possible in a different program, because it was never possible in LibreOffice Writer. You likely remember how you did that in Word - that program, actually, allows such a selection.
It certainly is technically possible to select all footnotes, because the LibreOffice extension AltSearch by Tomáš Bílek can do this. See my summary at my blog. I am basically copying the post by manj_k.
This query comes up again and again, all over the web. Please, oh please would the LibreOffice gods add “select all footnotes” to a main menu. Please!
The way I found is kind of hackerish, but solves the problem. One will need some knowledge of XML.
I got a science work from a friend and had to make a book out of it. It was of course in .docx format. After saving the file as ODT All the footnotes had the default style.
Here is what I did.
Saved the work in ODT format.
Opened the file as an archive and extracted only content.xml
I opened the content.xml with my favorite text editor - Vim. You can use your favorite. Note, that you need a text editor, not a word processor. Anything better than notepad would work - zed, vscode,notepad++, gedit etc.
I pretty-fied the file using a command line tool. In my case it was xmllint. I use linux. The editors above may have such feature them selves. Or search for some XML prettyfier online, if you use Windows. Here is my command:
xmllint --format content.xml >content_pretty.xml
Then I looked in the file and found that all footnotes were wrapped with style “Standart”. It had to be “Footnote”.
I used “search and replace” feature in Vim the command in Vim is the following:
% means “the whole file”. s is the command “find and replace”. The first piece of XML means “What I search for”. The second is “What I want to replace it with.”. The modifier “g” is for global - all occurrences in one line - not only the first. “c” is for “interactive” - “Ask me each time”.
After I replaced several occurrences. I put the file back to the archive. Note the file must be named content.xml. ODT files are just archives. Then I opened the ODT file with LO Writer. The foot notes now had the style “Footnote”.
Finaly I went back to the prettyfied content.xml and replaced all the occurences. I have put the file in the ODT archive.
Now I was able to select all footnotes the usual way, using the regular Find and replace window and searching for objects with style “Footnote”. Then I was able to apply whatever I wished on the selected footnotes.
