When I compile to ODT, footnotes show up in the main text instead of as “real” footnotes (i.e., under a separator line in the footer). If I export to RTF, then open in LibreOffice and save as ODT, the docs look fine. Can I eliminate the extra step? Thx, kraml
This is unfortunately a limitation of the ODT converter being used. It doesn’t have support for creating proper footnotes, so we are formatting them as endnotes in the text as a fall-back. Compiling to RTF and converting to ODT or just working in it as RTF is the best and route to take if footnotes and other advanced features are concerned.
Okay, I can live with that. Thanks! kraml
Can I re-open this? At my age I forget things, including that I had started this thread back in February. As I have gotten in to the serious dissertation writing stage, I have found that I have a couple of needs/requests. Reading a bunch of posts today, I have gathered that your odt conversion is developed/supported by a third party. Is it possible to make any changes? If so:
(1) Permit real footnotes in odt compile. It makes a significant difference when you have a document with hundreds of footnotes in each chapter.
(2) Output the footnotes (and endnotes) with no space between the footnote number and the text of the footnote. It’s easy to add space globally in the various word processors, but not as easy to remove an actual space that’s been inserted between the footnote number and the text of the note. The stylesheet for my institution prohibits space between the number and the text.
Thanks for your consideration here. I highly recommend Scrivener and have tried to get several of my friends to use it, or at least to view the short video. I was sold once I saw what it could do on-screen. Seeing that odt is an enormously popular format, I think that you could justify taking a closer look at it. You have created such an outstanding interface for footnotes in the inspector. It seems that a very small (in the eyes of a layman/non-developer) alteration could make a huge difference with odt.
Thanks!
kraml
Open/LibreOffice is pretty good with the RTF format, and we write proper footnotes to that format, so I would still recommend using RTF to get your work into OpenOffice.
I do, incidentally, agree with what you are saying, and down the road we do want to pursue better converters (and yes, using third-party converters is orders of magnitude more efficient than making your own). It’s just that right now, what we have is pretty good for most people. RTF opens in all the main word processors flawlessly, so that is where we have thrown our efforts (it is much easier to do so there, since we have put considerable development into RTF considering it is the base format for Scrivener).
Is multi-markdown an option? I know my school provided LaTeX templates for dissertations.
If one is willing to write in MultiMarkdown, then yes that is a way of producing really high-quality ODT files. It can convert to .fodt, which few other word processors use, but that doesn’t really matter since LibreOffice can open them easily and from there you’ve got every major format.
I’m not unwilling to try MM, I just don’t know if I have the brainpower to learn something new under the current dissertation deadlines. I’d have to have a knock-down-drag-em-out quick tutorial designed for scholarly writing with bullet-proof examples of headings, footnotes, block-quotes, and the like. kraml
Here is a cheat sheet for the syntax.
You would also want to read the MultiMarkdown chapter in the Scrivener user manual (which incidentally is a MultiMarkdown project—so you can view it as an example of its potential), to know what services we provide. For example you would not have to mess with footnotes, Scrivener can convert its own footnotes into MMD syntax. Likewise with figures and optionally, headings.
As for the time it takes to learn, I’d say that depends on your disposition. For myself I had been accustomed to writing using markup for years, in HTML and LaTeX format, as well as other systems similar to Markdown, such as Ulysses. So for me switching the MMD was actually very low-impact and intuitive, and I don’t think it even slowed down my current project one bit to do so, but it’s been a few years now. I started using it regularly back in 2006.
I should once again reiterate: if all you are trying to fix is getting proper footnotes into OpenOffice, then do try RTF first. That should be working for you and if you’ve already got a lot typed up, it’s going to be a lot easier than converting all of your rich text formatting to syntax.
Thanks. I will take a look at that MM tutorial. In the past couple of days I have also figured out ways to convert the rtf output within LibreOffice using search/replace, etc. I just have to be rigorously methodical about applying the adjustments.