Thread gone dormant a long time ago, but that actually gives me more the reason to post an update here. The default way for footnote anchors to be formatted, is by resizing and raising standard numerals. In modern LibreOffice (and presumably by now also OpenOffice), you have access to all OpenType features of a font. Make the following changes to your Footnote Anchor text style:
![Image]()
Figure 1: An example of what footnote anchors should not look like: ‘This is running text and the numbers[123] used[4567] as fake footnotes.[890]’
![Image]()
Figure 2: An example of what footnote anchors should look like, although these are positioned a bit too high. ‘This is running text and the numbers¹²³ used⁴⁵⁶⁷ as footnotes.⁸⁹⁰’
In Figure 1, notice how thin the numbers look compared to the rest of the text. In Figure 2, they are slightly wider, as you can see, specifically drawn to different dimensions to accommodate their smaller size, and with a stroke width that more closely matches that of the font (as they are, after all, not reduced-size numbers. Also take note that this is 12 pt text – 1⁄6″ or 4.2 mm – meaning the actual footnote number, which is about 75.8 % the height of the text here, is actually 1⁄8″ or 3.15 mm.
So to make sure you get good-looking footnotes that are easy to read, use the font’s built-in superscripts as your anchors. If you want to make sure your footnotes are all the same width, you can create a separate character style for them where you switch on tabular numbers (e.g. ‘Alegreya Sans:onum&tnum’, which gives you text-style numbers (o in onum for ‘old’) that are of the same tabular width) and assign this character style in Tools → Footnotes and Endnotes … → Footnote area [dropdown menu]. Finally, to assure the footnote text always starts at the desired position, but that the footnote paragraph is left-aligned, you can set ‘After’ in this menu to ‘\t’ which escapes a tab. This would give you this:
Figure 3: All settings applied.
Let’s review the changes:
- Font (2nd tab): Change font name to include ‘sups’, e.g. ‘Alegreya Sans:sups’ for superscripts.
- Placement (4th tab): Set to 100 % font size and height to either normal, or more commonly lowered by a few per cent.
Figure 1: An example of what footnote anchors should not look like: ‘This is running text and the numbers[123] used[4567] as fake footnotes.[890]’
Figure 2: An example of what footnote anchors should look like, although these are positioned a bit too high. ‘This is running text and the numbers¹²³ used⁴⁵⁶⁷ as footnotes.⁸⁹⁰’
In Figure 1, notice how thin the numbers look compared to the rest of the text. In Figure 2, they are slightly wider, as you can see, specifically drawn to different dimensions to accommodate their smaller size, and with a stroke width that more closely matches that of the font (as they are, after all, not reduced-size numbers. Also take note that this is 12 pt text – 1⁄6″ or 4.2 mm – meaning the actual footnote number, which is about 75.8 % the height of the text here, is actually 1⁄8″ or 3.15 mm.
So to make sure you get good-looking footnotes that are easy to read, use the font’s built-in superscripts as your anchors. If you want to make sure your footnotes are all the same width, you can create a separate character style for them where you switch on tabular numbers (e.g. ‘Alegreya Sans:onum&tnum’, which gives you text-style numbers (o in onum for ‘old’) that are of the same tabular width) and assign this character style in Tools → Footnotes and Endnotes … → Footnote area [dropdown menu]. Finally, to assure the footnote text always starts at the desired position, but that the footnote paragraph is left-aligned, you can set ‘After’ in this menu to ‘\t’ which escapes a tab. This would give you this:
Let’s review the changes:
- Tabular figures by creating a separate footnote number style, for which c.
- Added indentation such that footnote text running longer than one line will left-align flush with the text margin, and the first letter of the footnote will be indented by however much the tab is set to.
- Assigned footnote number character style, which set the numbers to tabular numbers.
- True superscript numbers, which (as can be seen by the green line I drew) top-align with the ascender of the font style.
Statistics: Posted by CannedMan — Sun Jun 09, 2024 2:32 am