typographic freaks: footnotes not vertically aligned to last line of body text in following page (as in good typographic style)

users
#1

in these months Libreoffice gained new useful features and team has
fixed many long-time-unsolved bugs

but there is a thing that, if we cannot strictly to define as a BUG, is,
at least, a "defect" regarding the right typography

I mean the behavior of footnotes versus the text body contained in
subsequent pages

professionally formatted books, look like this

http://tli.tl/m2507H

as you can see, footnotes (last footnote) are perfectly vertically
aligned with the last line of text in following page

http://tli.tl/0740NZ (zoom in detail)

while if we insert a footnote in OpenOffice/Libreoffice, this is what we get

http://tli.tl/2mfCgT

an horrible difference between footnote and last line of body text that
result not aligned that makes appereance of documents with footnotes
very ugly

if making this enhancement is not too hard, it will be a great step
toward dtp for LibreOffice

#2

... there is a thing that, if we cannot strictly to define as a BUG, is, at least, a "defect" regarding the right typography. I mean the behavior of footnotes versus the text body contained in subsequent pages. professionally formatted books, look like this [...] as you can see, footnotes (last footnote) are perfectly vertically aligned with the last line of text in following page, while if we insert a footnote in OpenOffice/Libreoffice, this is what we get [...] an horrible difference between footnote and last line of body text that result not aligned that makes appearance of documents with footnotes very ugly

Each page has an area within its margins where text may appear. If there is not sufficient space for a further line at the bottom of a page, it will be carried over to the next page, possibly leaving a small amount of unused vertical space within the text area of the page. If different pages have different type sizes or different paragraph spacing - or even just a different number of paragraphs - the bases of bottom lines may well not match up. In the case of your example, the spacing and the rule before the footnote and the reduced type size of the footnote itself all add up to mean that there can be no guarantee that the bases of the bottom lines will match up.

In order to correct this problem, you need to make small alteration to details of one or other page. It may be that you can remedy things by changing the bottom page margin slightly - but if you do that for the page style of the whole document, you are likely to introduce similar problems on other pages. The simplest solution may be to increase slightly the line spacing on the second page.

if making this enhancement is not too hard, it will be a great step toward dtp for LibreOffice

It's not clear what you want to happen here. Do you want the line spacing on your second page to be increased slightly so as better to fill the page? Or do you want the space before the footnote to be increased? Or both of these? Or, if (as would be usual) you had more than one paragraph on each page, would you want the paragraph spacing to be adjusted to suit? Or some combination of all these?

It's worth mentioning that you are comparing your word processor results with - as you say - the appearance of a professionally produced book. In that case, a quite separate process - "layout" - is carried out after the text is finalised. This is done is layout software, not in word processing software. Any modifications to the text - even minor ones - after this would potentially upset the appearance, so this is done in the final stages of production. And I doubt whether this is ever completely automated, in fact: rather, I imagine that expert user of layout software makes minor adjustments to achieve the sort of smart appearance that you crave.

So you are asking for OpenOffice or LibreOffice to become layout software as well as word processing software. I have no idea whether its developers would wish to do this.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker

#3

Hi :slight_smile:
Wow!!  Errr, is that something that LaTex or Scribus might be better at?  If so can they read and work with the output from LO?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#4

... there is a thing that, if we cannot strictly to define as a BUG, is, at least, a "defect" regarding the right typography. I mean the behavior of footnotes versus the text body contained in subsequent pages. professionally formatted books, look like this [...] as you can see, footnotes (last footnote) are perfectly vertically aligned with the last line of text in following page, while if we insert a footnote in OpenOffice/Libreoffice, this is what we get [...] an horrible difference between footnote and last line of body text that result not aligned that makes appearance of documents with footnotes very ugly

Each page has an area within its margins where text may appear. If there is not sufficient space for a further line at the bottom of a page, it will be carried over to the next page, possibly leaving a small amount of unused vertical space within the text area of the page. If different pages have different type sizes or different paragraph spacing - or even just a different number of paragraphs - the bases of bottom lines may well not match up. In the case of your example, the spacing and the rule before the footnote and the reduced type size of the footnote itself all add up to mean that there can be no guarantee that the bases of the bottom lines will match up.

In order to correct this problem, you need to make small alteration to details of one or other page. It may be that you can remedy things by changing the bottom page margin slightly - but if you do that for the page style of the whole document, you are likely to introduce similar problems on other pages. The simplest solution may be to increase slightly the line spacing on the second page.

if making this enhancement is not too hard, it will be a great step toward dtp for LibreOffice

It's not clear what you want to happen here. Do you want the line spacing on your second page to be increased slightly so as better to fill the page? Or do you want the space before the footnote to be increased? Or both of these? Or, if (as would be usual) you had more than one paragraph on each page, would you want the paragraph spacing to be adjusted to suit? Or some combination of all these?

It's worth mentioning that you are comparing your word processor results with - as you say - the appearance of a professionally produced book. In that case, a quite separate process - "layout" - is carried out after the text is finalised. This is done is layout software, not in word processing software. Any modifications to the text - even minor ones - after this would potentially upset the appearance, so this is done in the final stages of production. And I doubt whether this is ever completely automated, in fact: rather, I imagine that expert user of layout software makes minor adjustments to achieve the sort of smart appearance that you crave.

So you are asking for OpenOffice or LibreOffice to become layout software as well as word processing software. I have no idea whether its developers would wish to do this.

Wow!! Errr, is that something that LaTex or Scribus might be better at?

I'm not an expert in layout software, but I suspect that yes: both of these products have the required facilities.

If so can they read and work with the output from LO?

Apparently Scribus can. In any case, anyone working with layout software tends to expect to start with fairly plain text, perhaps with only italics, bold, superscripts, subscripts, and so on, along with footnotes, marked in the text. The clever stuff is then all done in the layout software.

Brian Barker

#5

On Thu, 20 Dec 2012 06:06:00 +0000 (GMT)
Tom Davies <tomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk> dijo:

Wow!!  Errr, is that something that LaTex or Scribus might be better
at?  If so can they read and work with the output from LO?

TeX, LaTeX, and their family can certainly do footnotes. However, I
don't think they are as capable at importing LO/OOo text as Scribus is.

Scribus will directly import text from Writer, and preserve styles in
the process. You can even map the Writer styles to Scribus styles if
you want. Scribus works very well with LO/OOo.

However, the current stable version of Scribus (1.41) lacks footnotes
and tables, although they are on the roadmap for the next release. As
for footnotes, however, Scribus will preserve the superscripts in the
text, and will convert the text of the footnotes to endnotes. After
importing the text to Scribus you can cut the endnotes off the end of
the story and paste in as a new story. The new story can be manually
threaded to text frames at the bottom of the appropriate pages. Unless
you have a gazillion footnotes, this works very well.

#6

Hi :slight_smile:
Thanks :)  It is this sort of improving co-operation between different products that i really like about OpenSource.

Imo It beats having 1 massively bloated program with tons of features that almost no-one ever uses and that ends up with those features creating problems or deteriorating due to changes elsewhere in the program.  Just split functionality off into programs (or in some cases just add-ons) that can have a dedicated community that are able to get on with developing things themselves without having to ask people that deal with completely unrelated functionality if they can have permission.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#7

I thought I had seen something about this some time ago either on this mailing list of the A00 mailing list. The topic was "Register true". If you do a web search you may find the entire thread.
      To do this, you must change the Page style for your document.
1. Open the Styles and Formatting window using F11 to do so.
2. At the top of this window, click the Page Style icon. (4th icon from the left). The list of page styles appear.
3. Right click the highlighted page style. (If you are not using a custom page style, this will be Default .)
4. Click the Page style.
5. It is in the Layout settings section (bottom right).
6. Click the box labeled "Register-true".
7. Click OK.
      This is the setting that printers use to make sure the lines of adjacent pages line up.

--Dan

#8

[...]
unfortunately, *register true* does not work in this case and can't help to preserve the right alignement of footnotes with last line of body test in following page. Try to believe

current *register true* feature, only helps to keep together aligned between pages, BODY TEXT in page (only 1 paragraph style). Register true is calculated on a SINGLE PARAGRAPH STYLE, (this is a defective behavior, since if you write citations in smaller body, applying REGISTER TRUE, line spacing will be not coherent with font size)

#9

It's too bad that you couldn't manage to keep this in a single thread. I
responded in the other thread & provide a screenshot that shows the
footnote in line with the page two text.

#10

Hi :slight_smile:
It does take a while to get used to the lists.  Odd weirdnesses are difficult to avoid especially at first.

I missed the screenshot in the other part of the thread but probably it's just because i haven't got that far back yet. 
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile: