Bug 112064 - FORMATTING Multiple footnotes per line in the footer, rather than the default one footnote per line.
Summary: FORMATTING Multiple footnotes per line in the footer, rather than the default...
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
: 76811 124334 124335 151474 157893 (view as bug list)
Depends on: 124334
Blocks: Footnote-Endnote ODF-spec
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2017-08-28 01:07 UTC by Saqer
Modified: 2023-10-27 11:23 UTC (History)
9 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
Many footnotes per line (68.30 KB, image/png)
2017-08-28 01:10 UTC, Saqer
Details
5 footnotes, on two lines. (50.52 KB, image/png)
2017-08-28 16:47 UTC, Saqer
Details
Published example of footnotes sharing the same line. (19.64 KB, image/png)
2020-06-17 12:53 UTC, R. Green
Details

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.
Description Saqer 2017-08-28 01:07:12 UTC
Description:
LO formats footnotes to be separated in a way that there's one footnote per line.

This leaves plenty of whitespace on a page when the footnotes are extremely brief but numerous. I'd like to separate footnotes by tabs (so that we can have 2, 3, or 4 footnotes per line).

I haven't found other workarounds to do this.

Steps to Reproduce:
1 Insert footnotes in any text.
2 Footnotes appear in the footer.
3 No option to change the formatting of the footnotes to have multiple on one line.

Actual Results:  
Each footnote by default appears separate on its own line.

Expected Results:
Each footnote can be adjusted to be included with other footnotes on the same line.


Reproducible: Always

User Profile Reset: 

Additional Info:
I am aware that this is possible using LaTeX (https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/28736/footnotes-on-the-same-line).


User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.105 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/1.92.917.43
Comment 1 Saqer 2017-08-28 01:10:29 UTC
Created attachment 135821 [details]
Many footnotes per line

This actually is a paragraph of footnotes in Arabic, notice how the footnote text of footnote ٢٢ continues in the second line.
Comment 2 Dieter 2017-08-28 06:19:23 UTC
I confirm this an enhancement. I think it is for example useful, if you only have 2 or 3 very short footnotes.
Comment 3 Saqer 2017-08-28 16:47:55 UTC
Created attachment 135829 [details]
5 footnotes, on two lines.

Notice 5 footnotes (٦٣، ٦٤، ٦٥، ٦٦) all on one line, and one footnote ٦٧ on the next line.
Comment 4 Regina Henschel 2017-08-28 22:55:54 UTC
Such structure can not be represented in current ODF 1.2. An implementation would need an temporarily loext namespace and a proposal for ODF 1.3 to OASIS.
Comment 5 Justin L 2018-03-31 09:00:27 UTC
*** Bug 76811 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 6 Dieter 2019-03-27 08:22:18 UTC
*** Bug 124335 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 7 Dieter 2019-03-27 08:22:58 UTC
*** Bug 124334 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 8 Dieter 2019-03-27 08:23:50 UTC
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #4)
> Such structure can not be represented in current ODF 1.2. An implementation
> would need an temporarily loext namespace and a proposal for ODF 1.3 to
> OASIS.

Regina, will this feature be possible with ODF 1.3?
Comment 9 Regina Henschel 2019-03-27 14:03:03 UTC
(In reply to Dieter Praas from comment #8)
> Regina, will this feature be possible with ODF 1.3?

Not for ODF 1.3. That has feature freeze since July 2018. And to get it into ODF 1.4 you need a proposal for OASIS and an implementation in LO.
Comment 10 Dieter 2019-03-27 14:21:38 UTC
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #9)
> (In reply to Dieter Praas from comment #8)
> > Regina, will this feature be possible with ODF 1.3?
> 
> Not for ODF 1.3. That has feature freeze since July 2018. And to get it into
> ODF 1.4 you need a proposal for OASIS and an implementation in LO.

So who is responsible for this or who decides to go for it?
Comment 11 Regina Henschel 2019-03-27 14:46:59 UTC
(In reply to Dieter Praas from comment #10)
> So who is responsible for this or who decides to go for it?

You only need a developer to implement it. You can ask the UX team in advance whether they have any serious concerns about implementing such a feature.
Comment 12 Dieter 2019-03-27 15:28:17 UTC
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #11)
> (In reply to Dieter Praas from comment #10)
> > So who is responsible for this or who decides to go for it?
> 
> You only need a developer to implement it. You can ask the UX team in
> advance whether they have any serious concerns about implementing such a
> feature.

Design-Team, what do think? Besides that I wonder, if there is any coordination for OASIS proposals by the QA-Team or the ESC.

cc: Design-Team
cc: Xisco Fauli
Comment 13 Heiko Tietze 2019-03-28 11:42:44 UTC
Never seen footnotes being formatted like this. But searching the web I'm obviously wrong, there are many such requests. Tex makes it very easy and Microsoft talks about a workaround of a pilcrow with hidden font effect. Neither we can select the wrapping character on footnotes nor does making it hidden has an effect on the layout when it's done in the document.

I would appreciate a solution that doesn't require a new UI. For example, Paragraph Style > Text Flow > Breaks > [x] Insert (on, with a new option for Line wrap). But anyway, the request makes sense for a good number of users.


/off-topic
(We should also implement this: https://www.xkcd.com/1208/)
Comment 14 Xisco Faulí 2019-11-29 13:28:23 UTC
Changing priority back to 'medium' since the number of duplicates is lower than 5
Comment 15 R. Green 2020-06-17 12:53:45 UTC
Created attachment 162116 [details]
Published example of footnotes sharing the same line.

Allowing footnotes to share a single line is certainly a feature of many published works. See the attached example (Ernle, "English Farming Past and Present," Longman, Green and Co. 1936, 5th ed.).
Comment 16 Heiko Tietze 2020-06-18 10:04:10 UTC
(In reply to Regina Henschel from comment #11)
> You only need a developer to implement it. You can ask the UX team in
> advance whether they have any serious concerns about implementing such a
> feature.

No serious objection, MSO can also apply columns.

I wonder how users understand columns in general - as attribute of the page style it wont be applicable to footnotes and frames are also not helpful. So we either name this property differently like "queues". Or have a (virtual) frame behind the footnotes that allows this configuration.

The examples look like a preference of left to right before top to bottom (given we have 3 columns, the number 1-3 are in row 1, 4 comes at col1,row2). That's different to the current behavior with top to bottom first.
Comment 17 J22Gim 2023-09-25 14:30:19 UTC
Not sure if this comment belongs here or if I should create another thread, but the title ('FORMATTING Multiple footnotes per line in the footer, rather than the default one footnote per line.) seems reasonably close.

Sometimes we write applications or documents with limited space (eg. maximum page number allowed) so we have to be creative so use space efficiently. Usually, I try to avoid footnotes because they are very inefficient in this sense. But.. I need them!

I would love to be able to format the footnotes to be consecutive. For example, instead of: 


[Main text]
__________
1. First footnote.
2. Second footnote.
3. Third footnote (and waste of space to my right)
4. More wasting of space on the right side of the page
5. So on.




I would really appreciate it if footnotes could be formatted like this:



[Main text]
__________
1. First footnote. | 2. Second footnote. | 3. Third footnote (note how I use all the available space!) | 4. No more wasting space, now we use the full width of the available space for text. | 5. I'm using less than 5 lines now.



In this case, I used the '|' character, but ideally, the user would be able to set an (arbitrary? or from a set of options) separator (e.g. space, semicolon, '|', etc.)
Comment 18 Heiko Tietze 2023-09-26 07:39:38 UTC Comment hidden (off-topic)
Comment 19 m_a_riosv 2023-10-23 10:26:03 UTC Comment hidden (off-topic)
Comment 20 J22Gim 2023-10-23 12:09:11 UTC Comment hidden (off-topic)
Comment 21 Heiko Tietze 2023-10-23 12:16:03 UTC
(In reply to J22Gim from comment #20)
> So here we are again :)

Maybe I was wrong. Anyway, I like the idea but wonder if this is covered by ODF.
Comment 22 Heiko Tietze 2023-10-26 08:29:54 UTC
*** Bug 151474 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 23 ajlittoz 2023-10-26 08:59:08 UTC
IMHO, all necessary tools are already present in Writer.

Footnote area could be considered a "floating" section. Then page style Footnotes tab is extended to reference section's Columns, Indent and Area tabs to define configuration settings.

Footnotes/Endnotes tab is of course excluded because notes are forbidden within notes and also to avoid recursive loop.
Comment 24 Heiko Tietze 2023-10-26 09:03:15 UTC
(In reply to ajlittoz from comment #23)
> IMHO, all necessary tools are already present in Writer.
Could you share an example please?
Comment 25 ajlittoz 2023-10-27 11:23:56 UTC
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #24)
> (In reply to ajlittoz from comment #23)
> > IMHO, all necessary tools are already present in Writer.
> Could you share an example please?

I am sorry if I created confusion, leading to think this is presently possible.

My intention was to suggest a possible solution based on the section feature. If footnote area can some way or other be considered a section, section configuration allows to layout the area multi-columns.

Looking carefully at the attached examples, notably the Arabic "Many footnotes per line", multicolumn does not solve completely the request. In this example, we rather have end-of-paragraph suppression (which IMHO makes detection of note start more difficult).

I know that ODF does not cover the case.

My proposal for a section needs serious thinking about it because:
-1- footnote location is not known in advanced (apart the area is flushed vertically against footer boundary)
-2- it extends upwards until it meets main text
-3- it may spill over to next page

-1- is probably the most serious
-2- any section grows (downwards), so not knowing its size can probably be handled
-3- sections are already continued on next page when needed

Another approach could be to consider a frame, but I think frames don't fit here because they need an anchor (to which "object" attach this anchor?). Using a page anchor may lead to more problems than a section.