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[Solved] Moving footnotes in Writer-to-Word porting ...

Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2015 7:21 pm
by webistrator
I've got a 100+ page doc. going with some footnotes. Writer does nice work making them, but when I copy/paste the text with footnotes into a "mirror" Word doc. (my publisher wants a Word doc. for e-book/EPUB purposes) the footnotes are no longer at the bottom of the relevant text page. The footnote callout in the text is now on, say, p. 3 (different p. formatting/line spacing in the Word doc. -- not my idea) and the footnote itself is back on p. 2 like it is in Writer, but now BEFORE the callout.

I say, "...as promised" because I've read elsewhere in OO/Writer 4.1.1 (that's what I'm using primarily) that footnotes move without a problem to Word. OK, now, I'm copying/pasting the footnoted text and not actually saving the whole doc. from ODT to Word format...is that the problem? Could I save the Writer doc. in ANY Word format -- e.g., .doc OR .docx and have the footnotes move correctly?

Thanx! (and an aside to "acknak": I'm here...so home free! Thanks again)

Webistrator

Writer 4.1.1/"OpenOrifice" on MS 7-64 (desktop) <--> Writer/"LibreOrifice" 4.4 on MS8.1-64 (laptop)

Re: Moving footnotes in Writer-to-Word porting not as promis

Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2015 7:50 pm
by RoryOF
You could try a roundabout way. Use /File /Export as PDF to make a PDF file from your .odt original. Then use
http://www.zamzar.com
to convert from PDF to DOC.

Or even quicker - try Zamzar to convert direct from .odt to .doc.
 Edit: I suggested the above, as I had (wrongly) assumed that the original poster had already tried /File /Save as with MS Word 97/2000/Xp (.doc) format selected in the Filetype dropdown. 

Re: Moving footnotes in Writer-to-Word porting not as promis

Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2015 9:23 pm
by thomasjk
Try saving as .doc file. File-->Save As--->Microsoft Word 97,2000,XP,2003 from the file type drop down.

Re: Moving footnotes in Writer-to-Word porting not as promis

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2015 4:42 am
by jrkrideau
and the footnote itself is back on p. 2 like it is in Writer, but now BEFORE the callout.
I'm surprised they even showed up. As Thomas says, save in .doc format. My experience is that this usually works very well.

Re: Moving footnotes in Writer-to-Word porting not as promis

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2015 4:58 am
by RusselB
I say, "...as promised" because I've read elsewhere in OO/Writer 4.1.1 (that's what I'm using primarily) that footnotes move without a problem to Word.
I'd like to know where you read that, so that source of the the claim can be checked.
I know that, any time I've saved a file in anything other than the Open Document Format (.odt for text), I get a warning stating
This document may contain formatting or content that cannot be saved in the Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP file format. Do you want to save the document in this format anyway?

Re: Moving footnotes in Writer-to-Word porting not as promis

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2015 12:02 am
by webistrator
CAVEAT: LONG AND TEDIOUS FOR NON-CARERS!

OK, it's clear to me that this copy/paste mode from a ODT file to DOC file -- what I do in bits and pieces -- is not the thing to do. RussellB, you said, "I'd like to know..." -- OK, it was on:

https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Docume ... ring_Files

-- under "Footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents and indexes" where it says, "Footnotes, endnotes and indexes all import / export correctly. ...".

The operative word seems to be "export" and not copy/paste. I've now tried that and it seems to be working, solving the footnote issue, and most of your answers suggest this.

Why didn't I just export instead, you ask? You asked, no? Tedium alert!...a lot of the ODT formatting/orthography doesn't "port" well because I'm working in multiple languages at the same time (Icelandic/Norse, German and English). E.g., hyphenation doesn't work in the re-pasted DOC stuff even though it is already in the ODT text (done manually as well because apparently OOWriter thinks even my obvious English is Icelandic/Norse and/or German just because there's a just bit of those in there -- ergo, no auto-hyphenation for ANYTHING). So I copy the manually corrected/hyphenated stuff from ODT into the DOC file, adding it to the stuff already done earlier so I only have to pick through the new stuff copied over from OOWriter. I guess you'd net it all out by saying that neither Writer nor Brand MS Word likes mixed language stuff, so both just ignore it. It would seem to me that simply "daisy-chaining" the dict's. together when spell-checking/hyphenating would solve this since it's all background work anyway, but...

Now, under "export" it still doesn't move cleanly from ODT to DOC (misspelled English isn't corrected in EITHER ODT or DOC, hyphenation doesn't happen even though I've got all the dictionaries installed in OOWriter because in spite of having Super Plus Ultra Office 2010, MS wants me to pay extra to buy three $99 language paks to do free translation for Googlebooks/OpenArchive). I'm hoping someday OOWriter will awaken and fix it on its side so I can thumb my nose at MS... .

Anyway, RussellB, that "you may lose..." msg. you refer to isn't happening when exporting. So I'm calling this "solved" for the time being. The only other quirk is not being able to export to DOCX (XML format), particularly since ODT is XML already. Again, you ask, why export if my publisher wants XML and ODT is already XML? I work with an indie publisher called Smashwords and everything submitted for Smashwords E-books has to go through their hybrid "Meat Grinder" to assume the proper composition for e-booking. And boy, is it finicky because as yet it doesn't even look at OOWriter ODT/XML! Someday, maybe.

Thanks, all (..now how do I run this up the flag as "solved"...?)

J. in CO (aka webistrator)

Re: Moving footnotes in Writer-to-Word porting not as promis

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2015 12:10 am
by RusselB
A suggestion based on what I've read, is to try LibreOffice instead of Apache Open Office.
LibreOffice is, to my understanding, a lot more compatible with the .???X formats that the publisher seems to be wanting.

Re: Moving footnotes in Writer-to-Word porting not as promis

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2015 12:56 am
by RusselB
Thank you for the reference I requested.
Reading that section, I found that it reads
Footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents and indexes
Footnotes, endnotes and indexes all import / export correctly. Some issues have been found:
The location of the endnotes may change (in Word the endnotes are placed before the index. In Writer they are always at the end of the document).
Writer bibliographic entries become text in Word.
A three-column index exported from Writer to Word as three columns but on re-import it was one column.
On importing a Word file containing index entry fields, the index entry fields are imported but as fields to the left of the text rather than the field containing the text.
Summary: Working in a shared environment is possible with some minor issues.
I'd like to bring to your attention the little bit that immediately follows what you quoted, specifically
Some issues have been found:
The location of the endnotes may change (in Word the endnotes are placed before the index. In Writer they are always at the end of the document).

Re: Moving footnotes in Writer-to-Word porting not as promis

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2015 8:49 pm
by webistrator
RusselB wrote:...
I'd like to bring to your attention the little bit that immediately follows what you quoted, specifically
Some issues have been found:
The location of the endnotes may change (in Word the endnotes are placed before the index. In Writer they are always at the end of the document).
Hi, RusselB

That's a caveat regarding endnotes. I'm dealing with footnotes to in my eye it doesn't apply.

Cheers!

W.

Re: Moving footnotes in Writer-to-Word porting not as promis

Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2015 3:38 am
by Akram
webistrator wrote:CAVEAT: LONG AND TEDIOUS FOR NON-CARERS!
... The only other quirk is not being able to export to DOCX (XML format), particularly since ODT is XML already. Again, you ask, why export if my publisher wants XML and ODT is already XML? I work with an indie publisher called Smashwords and everything submitted for Smashwords E-books has to go through their hybrid "Meat Grinder" to assume the proper composition for e-booking. And boy, is it finicky because as yet it doesn't even look at OOWriter ODT/XML! Someday, maybe.


I gave up on Smashwords's meatgrinder and went with BookTango instead. However, if you want to keep everything in XML you could try experimenting with this workflow:

create document in OpenOffice
save as odt
change extension to zip
unzip file and extract content.xml
create XSLT script to convert content.xml to, e.g., HTML for Smashword