Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 31225
No footnotes in frames
Last modified: 2016-03-22 15:42:22 UTC
The footnote icon is greyed-out if you are entering text in frames or text-boxes (from the drawing tool). Apparently captions are kept in frames as well, and thus it is impossible to insert a footnote in a caption. Suggested solution in the forum was a cross-reference on a white footnote somewhere else but this is just a hack...
Created attachment 16308 [details] Footnote may not be entered in the frame or the grafics caption
Yes, that's a conceptional limitation. Problem is, that the exact position of the footnote cannot be defined here, because the frame has its different positions by page-, paragraph- and character-anchor. Becaue of this concept, the podition of the footnote connt be clearly defined inside the surrounding paragraph.
*** Issue 60898 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
*** Issue 73464 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Still present in 2.0. This is quite frustrating as it makes referencing figures (pictures, graphs and so on) harder than it should be.
This is indeed an important issue and it is quite a large restriction in writing scientific articles. Still present in 2.3. on Windows XP and Linux
Still present in OOo 3.0 (final) on Mac OS X. It's pitty that the problem is known since 2004 and not fixed yet.
Still around in 3.2. This is a defect, not a nice gadget. It means that if a writer needs to add only one footnote or endnote in a caption, (s)he has to abandon using captions in the entire document.
There is a workaround: insert the footnote near the caption and then cross- If you want to be certain that the real footnote anchor is on the same page of the figure, you can change the wrapping for the figure frame so the footnote anchor is to the right of the figure.
"...and then cross-reference it inside the caption" It seems I lost some text when copy/pasted my previous answer, sorry.
To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on my owner to the owner "requirements".
I only can stress the need for footnotes in captions. The word processor already is powerful, so it almost cannot be understood, that this important feature is missing for so long. In scientific articles it is a basic need to refer to the source of a figure without overloading the caption.