Placement of endnotes

[BlebNevus]

I'm noticing two (perhaps related) problems with the placement of my endnotes in LibreOffice. First, three blank pages appear between the end of my document and the first endnote, and I can't figure out why - or how to get rid of them. Second, the first two pages of endnotes start about a quarter of the way down their respective pages (rather than at the top, where they belong) and, even more oddly, the third page of endnotes starts about 2/3 of the way down its page.

I don't see any relevant setting for endnotes under Insert/Footnotes & Endnotes or under Tools/Footnotes & Endnotes. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[RoryOF]

Turn on /View /Non printing characters and see if the blank pages are caused by empty paragraphs; that same command turns off the (non printing) display. One empty page may be caused by your page structure inserting a left page before your Endnotes page starting on a right page.

Are these genuine Endnotes, or are they Footnotes being placed at the end of the document? On the Endnote Page Style, on the Footnote tab, is "Not larger than page area" checked, or is "Maximum footnote height" checked, with a setting for the area to use set?

My /View /Non printing characters is /View Formatting marks on LibreOffice.

[RoryOF]

Also asked at
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question ... t-on-page/

[John_Ha]

I'm noticing two (perhaps related) problems with the placement of my endnotes in LibreOffice. First, three blank pages appear between the end of my document and the first endnote, and I can't figure out why - or how to get rid of them.

See 11A. Why is my page count so high? Why does my page count keep changing? Why do white gaps appear in my document? in [Tutorial] Some useful hints on using images for a discussion of the reason.

It is because laying out a document with many footnotes or endnotes can take many minutes - I have seen over 30 minutes - and AOO/LO may drop out of looping before the layout is complete, leaving the gaps. Endnotes (at the end of sections or the end of the document) lay out faster than footnotes (at the bottom of the page) but they both have the same problem.

The fix is to do nothing - don't even scroll - until the CPU taken by AOO/LO falls to a very low value showing that page layout has been completed. But you then make an edit and add or remove a few words and you cause that page to spill or pull up text which causes the next page to spill or pull up ... and so on, rippling right through to the last page of the document. It is a gargantuan task to change the layout, page numbers etc.

Notice the page count at bottom left - it keeps on varying and is always larger than the actual, proper page count because of the white spaces.

See Re: OpenOffice always crashes when opening this one document for a really bad case.

For example, consider what happens if footnote xyz position is on the last line of the text [on that page] before the footnotes start, and footnote xyz itself is the last footnote on the page. There are many such instances.

Say there is now a text spill on that page during page layout. The spill pulls the last line of text with the footnote marker number onto the next page > which pulls the footnote itself onto the next page [which spills every subsequent page so they all have to be laid out again!!!] > which frees up empty space on the previous page > which allows the line of text to be pulled back > which brings back the footnote marker in that line > which brings back the footnote itself > but there isn't enough space for it > so the last line of the text with the footnote pointer gets spilled ... and we get back to where we started. The loop is endless but AOO pulls out of the loop after a set time and the layout is as it was when AOO pulled out.

This is why the page count is so variable [and why you see white gaps].

[BlebNevus]

Thanks for these replies. As it happens, the problem has changed since my original post. I saved the document under a new name. When I reopened it, instead of skipping pages before the endnotes, the document had converted them into footnotes and placed them at the bottom of the page where the superscript number appears!

I then tried to copy & paste a chunk of the doc to send to someone and was surprised to find the endnotes were where they were supposed to be in the new (abridged) doc. Hmmm. I tried copying & pasting the whole thing. Now the endnotes start appearing as footnotes at the bottom of pg. 14 (out of 18). And there isn't even a note on that particular page that might have accidentally been saved as a footnote instead of an endnote.

In short, my new challenge is to figure out why what I had created as endnotes are now being treated as footnotes - either all the way through or midway through the document.

[John_Ha]

Footnotes can be changed to endnotes by Tools > Footnotes/Endnotes ..., where footnotes can be positioned on the page as footnotes; or at the end of the document (actually the section) as endnotes.

Showing that a problem has been solved helps others searching so, if your problem is now solved, please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.

[Bill]

Are you saving in the .doc format? In Normal View, I'm seeing the second problem with endnotes when opening .doc files with LO 6.4 or LO 7.0. The endnotes are displayed as footnotes, sometimes on the appropriate page, sometimes not. If I turn on Preview, it shows the endnotes at the end of the document. After closing Preview, the endnotes are then displayed at the end of the document in Normal view. Opening the same document in AOO 4.1.9, it always shows the endnotes at the end of the document. This looks like a bug in LO. There is an unconfirmed bug report for LO 6.4 describing a similar problem:

Bug 137970 - A file with created in Writer 6.3 had endnotes distributed throughout the text instead of all being at the end when opened in 6.4

[BlebNevus]

Bill: Interesting! Yes, I'm saving files as .doc. And today (perhaps as a result of looking at it in Print Preview, perhaps not) it's back to treating all the endnotes as footnotes -- rather than starting to do that well into the document.

Does your experimenting suggest any workaround for this bug?

[John_Ha]

I'm saving files as .doc ... Does your experimenting suggest any workaround for this bug?

Yes. Stop saving as .doc file. Always save as a.odt file. Treat the .odt copy as the master copy. Create a copy as a .doc if you need one and delete the .doc file after use.

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for a description of differences and for why you should always work in, and save Writer files as .odt, Calc files as .ods, Impress files as .odp etc.

[BlebNevus]

Thanks for the suggestion. I just resaved the document as an .odt file and the endnotes still appear as footnotes. I suppose it's possible that a document created as an .odt wouldn't have that problem, but it would be an enormous amount of work to strip out all the notes from this existing document and add them back, one at a time, in a new .odt file. Any workarounds to make endnotes appear at the end for my current document?

[RoryOF]

In OpenOffice (may be changed in location in LibreOffice) /Tools /Footnotes-Endnotes, Footnotes tab has checkboxes under Position to put Footnotes at "End of Page" or "End of document".

[Bill]

Does your experimenting suggest any workaround for this bug?

No, and I need to add to my earlier observations. While Print Preview shows the endnotes at the end of the document, they are still being displayed like footnotes at the bottom of the page, not like endnotes at the top of the page. That could account for the blank pages and large gaps that you reported originally.

[Bill]

Changing the option to put footnotes at the end of document didn't work for me. The endnotes remained displayed like footnotes at the bottom of the page. What did work was opening a new blank document and inserting the original .doc file using Insert > Text from file... The new document displayed the endnotes at the end of the document at the top of the page. This was a simple test document, so I don't know how it would work on a more complex document.

[RoryOF]

It has been reported that documents converted from .doc/.docx formats to .odt can have bad-mannered hangovers from these formats. It is worth trying to Copy and Paste the troublesome .odt into a new blank .odt file.

[John_Ha]

... the endnotes still appear as footnotes. ... Any workarounds to make endnotes appear at the end for my current document?

See my post above. It worked on a file with about 8,000 pages and about 800 footnotes/endnotes.

Something which starts life as a footnote can be converted to an endnote and then back to a footnote. Right-click any footnote and select Footnote.

Something which starts life as an endnote cannot be converted to an footnote.

Carefully read [Solved] Huge document, page count not advancing which was a footnotes / endnotes problem.

[Bill]

Something which starts life as a footnote can be converted to an endnote and then back to a footnote. Right-click any footnote and select Footnote.

There is an option to display footnotes at the end of the document, but I wouldn't call that converting footnotes to endnotes. Hovering the mouse pointer over the footnote anchor in the text still identifies it as a footnote and it still has the numbering specified for footnotes. If there were an actual conversion, I would expect it to be identified as an endnote when hovering the mouse pointer over the anchor and the numbering to follow the numbering specified for endnotes.

However, it's my understanding that BlebNevus is not trying to put footnotes at the end of the document, but has inserted endnotes which are being displayed at the bottom of pages, not at the end of the document. All my testing was also done using endnotes (no footnotes at all) and these endnotes also appeared at the bottom of pages instead of at the end of the document when the document was saved in the .doc format and reloaded with LO. When the same .doc file was opened with AOO 4.1.9 the endnotes did appear at the end of the document.

As a simple test, start a new document with LO, Add a short paragraph of dummy text and insert an endnote. Save it in .doc format and reload it. Does it reload as two pages with the endnote on the last page or as one page with the endnote at the bottom of the page?

[BlebNevus]

It has been reported that documents converted from .doc/.docx formats to .odt can have bad-mannered hangovers from these formats. It is worth trying to Copy and Paste the troublesome .odt into a new blank .odt file.

Can you explain what you mean by this? I have misplaced endnotes in a .doc file that remain misplaced when converted to an .odt file. What are you suggesting I do with the latter to get the endnotes to move where they belong?

[Bill]

LO 6.1.5.2 on Debian displays the endnotes in my test .doc files correctly at the end of the documents. Based on this and the unconfirmed bug report, the problem is probably caused by a bug introduced in LO 6.4.

[RoryOF]

It has been reported that documents converted from .doc/.docx formats to .odt can have bad-mannered hangovers from these formats. It is worth trying to Copy and Paste the troublesome .odt into a new blank .odt file.

Can you explain what you mean by this? I have misplaced endnotes in a .doc file that remain misplaced when converted to an .odt file. What are you suggesting I do with the latter to get the endnotes to move where they belong?

There was a typo in my earlier post which I have corrected: "bland" used in place of "blank".

Many reports on Forum of Files edited in both .doc/docx and .odt formats which fail in some niceties of advanced formatting when edited in odt format after an unknown number of format transfers. This, it was presumed in those cases, were caused by hangovers from the MS Office formats that did not transfer correctly back to .odt formats.

[RoryOF]

Using a short test file running on OpenOffice, when I transferred a footnote to be placed at end of document, it was placed on its own page, separate from an endnote, also at end of document.

[John_Ha]

It has been reported that documents converted from .doc/.docx formats to .odt can have bad-mannered hangovers from these formats. It is worth trying to Copy and Paste the troublesome .odt into a new blank .odt file.

Can you explain what you mean by this?

It is explained in [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files which discusses the problem and explains why you should always work in, and save, Writer files as .odt, Calc files as .ods, Impress files as .odp etc.

Don't ignore the warning message AOO gives you when you save as a .doc file.

[BlebNevus]

So no workarounds for fixing the problem with this existing document that was created in .doc?

[RoryOF]

Do you need to send the document to others for editing? If not, copy and paste it into a blank .odt document, make any adjustments you desire to the formatting, then /File /Export as PDF and send the PDF file.

[Bill]

So no workarounds for fixing the problem with this existing document that was created in .doc?

I posted a suggestion earlier that worked for me. Did you try it?

Here's another suggestion that worked for me:
1. Open the .doc file.
2. Save it in .docx format, then reload the file.
3. Save it in .odt format.

[Bill]

Since the problem is a bug in LO 6.4+ and not in the file itself, you could use AOO or an older version of LO to open the .doc file and save it in .odt format. The resulting .odt file should then open correctly in all versions of AOO or LO.

[BlebNevus]

Thanks for the suggestions. I decided to try Bill's interesting idea (which never would have occurred to me) to save the .doc file as a .docx file before then resaving it as an .odt file. To my surprise, the problem disappeared in the .docx version - all endnotes marched themselves to the end - without my having to use .odt at all. Because this whole process has shown that the formatting is unstable, with endnotes behaving entirely like footnotes and then abruptly shifting to behave like footnotes midway through the document (or vice versa), I want to hold off before declaring that this definitely works until it persists through several save/reopen cycles, adding and subtracting individual endnotes, etc. But it seems promising.

Meanwhile, might one of you who is familiar with doing such things consider reporting it as an official bug - or bring it to the attention of the engineers in charge of revisions? Endnotes are definitely screwy in .doc files, and I don't see anything in the release notes of LO 7 to indicate that the bug in v. 6.4 has been fixed.

[Hagar Delest]

.doc is a deprecated format. What would be the point to work on it further?
You can still report it: [Tutorial] Reporting bugs or suggestions.

[norms]

You may have to create an endnote page as a page style.

[Bill]

.doc is a deprecated format. What would be the point to work on it further?

Backward compatibility. If the bug isn't fixed, then LO can no longer claim compatibility for opening existing .doc files which have endnotes.

[Hagar Delest]

Indeed. Good point.
If it's a regression, perhaps it's not big deal to fix it and ensure better backward compatibility.