Description: When a document containing footnotes is made in LibreOffice, the said footnotes lose styling in MS Word. The separator line is misplaced, the footnote number and other formatting - too. The said applies to ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors too. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a .odt document in LibreOffice and add some footnotes. 2. Style the footnotes appropriately for academic journals and books. 3. Either open the .odt in MS Word / ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors, or save it as .docx beforehand... footnote styling is lost and this leads to other misplacements too. Actual Results: This styling is lost in MS Word or ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors. It's kept only if document is exported to PDF. Expected Results: Footnote styling shall be preserved in all costs, so that LibreOffice is suitable for academic writing. Reproducible: Always User Profile Reset: No Additional Info: Version: 7.6.3.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community Build ID: 29d686fea9f6705b262d369fede658f824154cc0 CPU threads: 8; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 19045; UI render: Skia/Vulkan; VCL: win Locale: bg-BG (bg_BG); UI: en-US Calc: CL threaded
(In reply to tpypta from comment #0) > 3. Either open the .odt in MS Word / ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors Inability of other software to read ODT is that other software's fault. It is nothing we can do about. > or save it as .docx beforehand... footnote styling is lost and this leads to > other misplacements too. Please provide a sample ODT, which, when saved as DOCX, opens wrong in MS Word. This would be the real interoperability bug on LibreOffice side, *if and only if* the respective formatting is supported at all in DOCX. It would be not a bug, if the formatting you discuss is not possible to represent in DOCX, the same with e.g. TXT, where inability to store bold or color is not a bug, but a natural format limitation.
Created attachment 191036 [details] A .odt for the purposes of the bug report Here is a sample document with some footnote styles applied. Please try opening it in Word. Depending if you open it in Word directly, or you save it in .docx beforehand, the lost stylistics is different.
(In reply to tpypta from comment #2) > Here is a sample document with some footnote styles applied. Thanks! > Please try opening it in Word. Depending if you open it in Word directly, This is completely uninteresting. Whatever Word does on opening ODF, if they are unable to open it properly, it is their bug. Please file it to Microsoft, and please avoid discussing it here, because it makes this issue cluttered with unrelated stuff, and makes it harder to really improve what we *can* improve. > or you save it in .docx beforehand, the lost stylistics is different. Please also provide a screenshot, comparing what you get in LibreOffice vs. in Word, *marking* the differences; and also provide a textual description of the issues, e.g. "I see different size of footnote number in the footnote area". This would enable to discuss specific issues. Something like "here is a document; go and compare things yourself, and make it ideal, quick!" is not going to work ;)
Created attachment 191037 [details] Footnote numbers misplaced, plus the first-line formatting. When LO saves a .docx, and then this .docx is opened in Word, the footnote number gets displaced, along with the footnote's first line indent. Here is a screenshot of the same LO-generated .docx, opened in LO and Word.
Update: I managed to narrow down the issue. It appears that it's related to the "Automatic" check-boxes in the style settings (Footnote Characters -> Position and Footnote -> Indents and Spacing -> First line). When they're disabled and instead a specific value is added, then Word correctly displays the footnotes. I'm not sure if it's a LO bug, or these "Automatic" check-boxes are something new in LO so Word need to catch up with compatibility... Anyway... when saving in .docx, LO can set "hard values" to these settings, with which Word can display correctly. There's another mishandling and it's with the separator line. When the file is saved as .docx, the separator line gets "Default Paragraph Style", and often in academic writing the line spacing is 1.5, and thus in Word the footnote separator line becomes overpadded. It'd be great if LO figures a way to avoid these misplacements, since footnote interoperability between office suites is something really important, depending on the usage case.
Already in 7.0, 5.0, 3.5 (tested on Linux). No need to use Word, can be seen in LibreOffice.