Formatting Footnotes

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Revision as of 00:25, 16 April 2006

In NeoOffice a "footnote" is composed of several distinct styles, each of which may have to be modified to achieve the style expected by your style manual. (Although this guide speaks of footnotes, the instructions are applicable to endnotes as well.)

1. The in-text number
   • The in-text number (is there a technical term for this?) is represented by the Footnote anchor style, which is a character style.
2. The bottom-of-the-page number
   • The bottom-of-the-page number (is there a technical term for this?) is represented by the Footnote Character style, which is also a character style.
3. The footnote text
   • The actual text contents of footnotes is represented by the Footnote style, which is a paragraph style.

     This style also controls the "spacing" between the number and the start of the text, though rather awkardly. In the Indents & Spacing tab of the "Paragraph Style" dialogue (ctrl-click the style name in the Stylist and choose Modify from the contextual menu), the settings for Indent "Before text" and "First line" control the indent of the footnote text (and spacing between the text and number); in many cases, "First line" should be the negative counterpart to the "Before text" value.

4. The separator line
   • The separator line (is there a technical term for this?) is controlled by the settings in the "Footnote" tab in the Page Style"; choose Page... from the Format menu and then click on the "Footnote" tab to modify this for the current document (or modify the Default page style).

     The settings in this tab also determine spacing between footnotes and between the document text and footnotes.

Since all of these are styles, you can create custom styles and use your own styles in place of the default styles by selecting your styles in the various drop-downs in the "Footnote Settings" dialogue (choose Footnotes... from the Tools menu). If you use many footnote styles, or consistently need to modify the default footnote styles, you should consider including them among the styles in your default template.