Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Footnotes and Endnotes are hidden together with reference numbers!!!

On 20/02/2012 at 23:57, wernerjvienna <werner-j@gmx.at> wrote:

> Some journal just demand to use [6-8] or  [10-12]  respectively in those
> cases, what is not useful for a html document of course. So my post above
> concerns only the problem of formatting foot- and end-notes and has nothing
> to do with reference manager software.

LibreOffice Writer is not capable of doing that. Either if you are using built-
in bibliographic feature, which is lacking some of basic functionality, or if 
you are using foot- or endnotes as references.

As student of sociology, I mostly deal with social sciences and I am used to 
authors who recklessly confuse footnotes, endnotes and bibliographic 
references. But I would expect scientists from natural, physical and formal 
sciences to be more strict.

Footnote is a place to add some further information, or comments, from author. 
They are not important enough to include in main text, but may be valuable for 
some of readers. Or they are simply funny remarks, which some people think 
should be avoided in scientific text. This is also place for comments from 
translator or publisher (although comments from translator/publisher are 
indicated in other way than comments from author). The point is, that reader 
may skip reading footnotes without loosing any of author main ideas.

Endnotes are footnotes put after the main part of the book or, less often, at 
the end of a chapter, instead of bottom of the page. Some publishers prefer it 
this way. If text in footnote is quite long (I have seen footnotes spanning 
across two and more pages), perhaps it is better to use endnotes instead.

References contains information about sources and further reading about some 
topic. These may be either full bibliographic entry (which has many 
disadvantages in texts longer than few pages) or unique identifiers which 
expand full bibliographic entry in bibliography, near end of a book.

These things should be distinguished. Yet, due to historical reasons and 
habit, they are not. Many people place references in footnotes.

In that Wikipedia article footnotes contains almost only references. Only 
footnote 14 contains what footnotes should contain -- commentary. Footnote 13 
contains references to works expanding topic, so they may be treated as either 
footnote, or reference (depending on writing style).

I am still sure that you are using wrong function (although it may provide 
something that *looks like* what you want to achieve). I still can't think of 
a single reason why anyone would want to insert multiple footnotes (multiple 
commentaries) at one place. Why don't just join them, if they refer to exactly 
the same part of text?

Although I still agree with you, that Writer is lacking some functionality in 
that area and it could (and perhaps should!) be improved.
-- 
Best regards
Mirosław Zalewski

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